Research collaborator; FWO postdoctoral researcher at KU Leuven
Koenraad Danneels
Postdoctoral Researcher in Urban Studies
University of Louvain and KU Leuven
Koenraad Danneels is a historian and urban planner researching ecological urbanism, urban metabolism, landscape architecture and activism. He uses historical and political-ecology perspectives to examine how ecological knowledge is translated into planning and how more-than-human concerns reshape urban design.
Koenraad Danneels is an FWO postdoctoral researcher and lecturer in the theory and history of urbanism at KU Leuven and a research collaborator of the Urban Metabolism Lab. Trained as a historian and urban planner, he completed a doctorate in 2021 on the translation of ecological-science ideas into Belgian urbanism across the twentieth century.
His research is positioned at the intersection of urbanism, landscape architecture, ecology, environmental history and activism. He studies ecological urbanism and urban-metabolism thinking, the production of compensation landscapes and the role of grassroots mobilisation in contemporary ecological design. Within the CO-HABITAT project, he contributed historical and conceptual perspectives to animal-inclusive spatial planning and the investigation of non-human agency in the Brussels-Capital Region. His current work examines the sociopolitics of ecological landscape design and uses history as both a critical lens and a method for understanding present-day planning debates.