Nele Aernouts

Nele Aernouts is an assistant professor of housing and urbanism at the Cosmopolis Centre for Urban Research. She teaches in the MSc in Urban Design and Spatial Planning and the MSc in Urban Studies at the Vrije Universiteit Brussel.
Her research and teaching focus on how questions of access to and control over housing and urban land are negotiated within housing initiatives and planning processes. Her work engages with two main areas: community-based responses to the housing ‘crisis’, housing precarity and speculation; and public action in housing development, governance and renovation. She is interested in understanding how these initiatives and processes are shaped, perceived and lived; as well as how they intersect with broader struggles for the right to housing, spatial agency, and alternative imaginaries about the production of space.
To explore these interactions from an engaged research perspective, she employs a range of qualitative research methods, including visual methods, storytelling, (institutional) ethnography, and participatory action research.