Danielle van den Heuvel is Professor of Early Modern Social and Economic History at Utrecht University. Her research has an interdisciplinary focus and centres around two main themes: the impact of institutions on groups in the margins of early modern society, and life in city streets before industrialisation. She is the author of the prize-winning Women and entrepreneurship. Female traders in the Northern Netherlands c.1580-1815 (Amsterdam 2007), and her work has appeared in journals such as SIGNS, Continuity and Change, Journal of Urban History, and The Historical Journal. Read more

Luca Bertolini is Professor of Urban Planning at the University of Amsterdam. His research and teaching focuses on the integration of transport and urban planning for humane, sustainable and just cities, concepts and practices to enable transformative urban and mobility change, and ways of enhancing collaboration across different academic disciplines and between academia and society. He currently coordinates the EX-TRA collaborative project, which explores how experimenting with city street uses, forms and regulations can trigger system-wide change in urban mobility and public space. Read more

James Symonds is Professor of Historical Archaeology at the University of Amsterdam. Symonds specializes in historical and contemporary archaeology and has worked on the archaeology of early modern and modern cities in the UK, and Finland. He is currently completing a Dutch Research Council (NWO) funded project entitled Diaspora and Identity which explores material life, ethnicity, and diet in the district of Vlooienburg, Amsterdam (1600-1800).

Caterina Villani is Assistant Professor of Urban and Regional Planning at the University College Dublin. Her research lies at the intersection of urban design, transport governance, and critical urban theory, with an emphasis on advancing spatial justice. Her recent co-led project, 'Planning Street Experiments for a Child-friendly City in London', was funded by the Wandsworth Borough Council, the Royal College of Art in London, and UCD APEP, to empower children to envision urban streets for a post-car future. She was finalist for the Royal Town Planning Institute Early Career Award for Research Excellence (2024). Her work has appeared in journals such as Cities, Journal, Journal of Planning Education and Research, Transport Policy.

Student Assistent 2023 | Stephanie de Graaf completed her History bachelor at the University of Amsterdam in 2022, and is currently a Architectural and Urban History & Research Master student at the UvA. Her master thesis is about the visibility of women in the streets of Amsterdam in the photography collection of Hendrik G. Breitner ca. 1900.

Student Assistent 2022 | Lou Rosenkranz is a Research Master Student in Urban Studies at the University of Amsterdam. With a background in Sociology and Political Science, she is interested in thought-provoking interdisciplinary endeavors. Currently, she researches transformative learning processes, and artistic practices in urban space. She is a Member of the Urban Knowledge Collective (UKC) which aims to collectivize knowledge to shape more just cities and a previous Curatorial Intern at Basis voor actuele kunst (BAK), a platform for theoretically informed, politically driven art and experimental research. For the Claiming the Streets project, she has the hat on for interactive formats and program outlining.

Student Assistent 2022 | Imke Chatrou completed her bachelor Media, Arts, Design and Architecture at the VU Amsterdam in 2019, and is currently doing her masters in Architectural and Urban History at the UvA. Her master thesis is about public bathhouses, the emancipation of working class women in nineteenth and twentieth century Amsterdam, and their visibility on the streets. She is currently working on the website of the Claiming the Streets Conference.

Gamze Saygi is an architect and a Research Fellow at the University of Amsterdam. She holds a PhD in Architecture from the Izmir Institute of Technology in Turkey. Her research focuses on the intersection of heritage, history, and digital methods for analysing and valorising (im)material cultures of the past. She was recently a member of The Freedom of the Streets Project (2019-2021) with her project “Digital Urban History”. Her research has been supported internationally by the Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research (NL), National Centre for Scientific Research (FR), Turkish Council of Higher Education and the European Association for Digital Humanities.

Student Assistent 2021 | Erik-Jan Kanne has an academic background in liberal arts and urban studies and worked as a student assistant for the Claiming the Streets conference. For this conference, he mapped the transdisciplinary fields of urban street research and interventions to aid in determining the content of the conference.