BK Talks: Building together!

Tom Daamen
Associate professor Urban Area Development, TU Delft
Tom Daamen is Associate Professor Urban Development Management (UDM) at Delft University of Technology in The Netherlands. He is also director of the Stichting Kennis Gebiedsontwikkeling, a public-private foundation that funds the advancement of academic knowledge and professional expertise in Dutch urban area (re)development. Tom is deeply involved in several academic research, education and valorisation projects on the fringe of spatial planning, urban governance, economic geography, and real estate and infrastructure development. In Delft, Tom lectures in several undergraduate, graduate, and post-experience master courses and supervises MSc as well as PhD research projects. He has been an invited international speaker at the University of Antwerp, Tongji University in Shanghai and Columbia University, New York. In the Netherlands, Tom advises local and regional authorities on public-private governance issues around complex spatial projects. 

Michael LaFond
Architect, Id22 Institute for Sustainability, Berlin
Michael LaFond works as Social Ecologist, Community Developer, Project Manager, Common Good Urban Activist and CoHousing Expert. He has an active role in transforming knowledge on and practices in social ecology, self-organized housing, post-growth urban development processes and sustainability. He is based in Berlin, where he is the Founder & Board Member of id22: Institute for Creative Sustainability as well as the Chair of the Stadtbodenstiftung Board of Trustees, Germany’s first Community Land Trust inspired non-profit foundation. Recent and current projects include the books CoHousing Cultures and CoHousing Inclusive, the annual community housing fair EXPERIMENTDAYS, the online platform CoHousing-Berlin, Creative Sustainability Tours and Kollektives Lernen.

Geert de Pauw
Coordinator of the CLT Brussels and the SHICC Interreg project
Geert De Pauw has been active for more than 20 years for the right to housing in Brussels, as an activist and community worker. In 2008, following a study visit to the Champlain Housing Trust, he started advocating for the establishment of a Community Land Trust in Brussels. He coordinated in the feasibility study, on behalf of the Brussels Capital Region, for the establishment of a CLT. Since the official establishment of Community Land Trust Brussels in 2013, he is coordinator of the association. From there he co-founded the European CLT partnership SHICC (Sustainable Housing for Cohesive Communities), which sets itself the goal of building a powerful CLT sector in Europe. He is also a board member of the Center for CLT Innovation.

Peggy Totte
Architect and urban designer
Peggy Totté is architect - urban designer and works on the theme of collective building and cohousing for the cultural architecture organization Architectuurwijzer in Belgium. She brought the exhibition ‘At Home. Building and Living in Communities’ from DAM Frankfurt to STAM Ghent (2018) and C-mine Ghenk (2017). Today she is curator of the exhibition ‘Housing Apart Together’ on collective housing in Flanders, which took place in Genk (2019), Ghent (2020) and Antwerp (2021). She is recognized as an expert in collective and cooperative housing in Flanders.

Tjeerd Haccou
Founding partner Space&Matter
Tjeerd Haccou studied architecture at Delft University of Technology and at SCI-Arc in Los Angeles, and founded Space&Matter in 2009 with two partners. He has an experimental ethos, using online and offline tools to bring together and empower communities so that they can assume leadership over the design of their own living environments. In this context, he pursues new financial and business models, as well as ventures that prioritise social good and inclusivity in the built environment. One of these ventures is CrowdBuilding.nl, an online platform that helps citizens initiating collective housing projects from the bottom up.