Dr.-Ing. Karl Beelen

I am an urbanist and urban landscape designer by training and I am broadly interested in urban resilience, urban food transitions, water management and peri-urban governance. I hold a PhD in Urbanisms from Eindhoven University. Before joining BUW I worked for many years in India both as a postdoctoral fellow at IGCS Chennai (RWTH Aachen/IIT‐Madras) and as a consultant in urban resilience (Water as Leverage Asia). My work combines urban and landscape design, trans-disciplinary research, and ethnographic field methods, which I apply to urban transformations and climate change adaptations. I write on design, data activism, farming, and ‘back-to-the-land’ futures in urban India.

book chapter, 2020       “Back to the land: Post-political utopias of organic living” in: K.C. Ho et al. (eds.) Post Politics and Civil Society in Asian Cities: Spaces of Depoliticisation. London: Routledge.

book chapter, 2019       “Translating friction. Mapping data and (peri‐)urbanization in the case of Chennai, South India.” in: T. Coomans et al. (eds.) Mapping historical landscapes in transformation. Louvain: Presses Universitaires de Louvain.

2018                                                                                                                                                            

“Inquiry and maps: Reflections ex-post on Sand, Fill and Water.” in: S. Favaro et al. (eds.) Mapping the Urban Question. Roma: Officina Edizioni, pp. 111-123. Bypass infrastructures of the peri-urban fringe. Workshop report IGCS Chennai.

2017

“Climbing up the rank ladder: imagining Chennai as a World-Class City”

2010

Article co-written with Roos Gerritsen and A. Srivathsan, in: ‘Most valuable urbanism’, MONU magazine on urbanism, #13, pp. 97-105.

“De kaart, het landschap en alle lagen ertussen” Article co-written with M. Dehaene, C. Doevendans, B. De Zwart and B. De Meulder, in: K. Bosma and J. Kolen (eds.) Geschiedenis en ontwerp. Een handboek voor de omgang met cultureel erfgoed. Nijmegen: Uitgeverij Vantilt, pp. 85-113.

“Imag(en)ing the real. The ‘region’ as a project of cartographic re-configuration” In: N. Meijsmans et al. (eds), Designing a region. Echoes from the Netherlands and elsewhere. Explorations in/of Urbanism 4, Amsterdam: Sun, pp. 24-37.

“Fills and deposits. Territories of compaction, extraction and [re]occupation” In: N. Meijsmans et al. (eds), Designing a region. Echoes from the Netherlands and elsewhere. Explorations in/of Urbanism 4, Amsterdam: Sun, pp. 62-73.

“Designing between Matrix and Map. The Reflexive Practices of MUST.” In: N. Meijsmans et al. (eds), Designing a region. Echoes from the Netherlands and elsewhere. Explorations in/of Urbanism, 4, Amsterdam: Sun, pp. 98-103.

2009

“The map’s critical project. Or, what do maps want?” In: On Territories. Oase Journal for Architecture, 80, pp. 78-90.

2008

“IJ-river, the Netherlands. Water and [re]production logics.” In: K. Shannon et al. (eds.), Water urbanisms. Amsterdam: Sun.

2007

“Amsterdam’s Diemer Territory. Mapping coproductions.” in: ‘Urban design case based theory and practice’, Journal of research in architecture and planning, vol (6.), Karachi.