As an interdisciplinary urban scholar, my research seeks to understand the spatial governance and lived experience of urban economies. How do new (digital) technologies reconfigure urban economies? What new urban livelihoods do such technologies enable, and how do workers and users navigate the forms of potential and precarity that accompany them? How do governance actors contend with the disruptive impact of such technologies on traditional modes of managing socio-spatial processes, and how do they themselves leverage technological solutions to confront contemporary governance challenges? In addressing such questions, I scrutinize how specific technologies are designed and how they function in practice, in specific places and at different spatial scales.

I am currently in the final phases of my dissertation research, which I have been conducting while based both in the UvA’s Department of Media Studies and the AISSR’s Urban Geographies research group. My PhD project is part of the ERC-funded project Platform Labor and applies critical urban studies and platform studies approaches to Airbnb, in order to develop a place-based understanding of the platformization of housing, households and urban governance in Amsterdam and Berlin. In my current postdoc research on The Digitalisation of Illicit Urban Economies I study how digitalization and new technologies affect illicit urban economies, in particular micro-level drug trade.

I am a graduate of the research master in Urban Studies (cum laude) and the bachelor in Human Geography and Urban Planning (cum laude) at the University of Amsterdam and I am affiliated with the Amsterdam School of Cultural Analysis (ASCA) and the Centre for Urban Studies.