Antwerp Metropolitan Area
Maarten Van Acker is Professor of Urban Design at the University of Antwerp and director of the Research Group for Urban Development. His work focuses on the relationship between infrastructure, mobility and urban transformation, exploring how transport systems can become catalysts for sustainable and healthy city development. Alongside his academic work, he advises cities, architecture firms and developers on complex urban transformation projects. He is partner at B-juxta and strategic advisor at B-city. Maarten serves as president of the World Heritage Commission Bruges and vice-president of Europan Belgium. He regularly contributes to the public debate on cities through publications, books and columns.
Both the master program Urban Planning and Development as the Research group for Urban Development of the Faculty of Design Sciences contribute to the development of knowledge for the sustainable transformation of cities and urban regions. We help students to develop a scientific and critical attitude, and train them in acquiring strategic and performance-oriented design skills. In the research group we focus on these research tracks: Spatial governance, Infrastructure & Mobilities, Climate & Resilience and Healthy cities.
At B-city, we guide complex urban projects and supervise their creation. Projects with a scale that carry the ambition to create a new city district are at the centre of our mission.
Europan is a thematic architecture and urban design competition of ideas and projects, followed by processes of implementations. Europan is a tool for European cities and urban actors to find and develop innovative strategies for their sites in transformation. Europan is a platform for young professionals of urban, landscape and architectural design less than 40.
B-juxta evolved from the Ghent-based JUXTA, which has its roots in Architectenbureau Van Acker – later Avapartners. Since its establishment in 1967, the office grew into an important player in Flanders in the field of restoration, renovation and reallocation of architectural heritage and continues to live on today as part of B.
Maarten was awarded with theFrancqui Fellowship by the Belgian American Education Foundation. Thanks to this scholarship, he continued his research on urban (infra)structures at Parsons - The New School for Design Strategies in New York. He taught at the Master Design & Urban Ecologies at the School of Design Strategies, and taught Theory of Urban Form in the Master of Architecture Program at the School of Constructed Environments.