Keynote speakers

Dr. Maud Lanau is Assistant Professor at Chalmers University of Technology (Sweden), in the research group of Sustainable Built Environments. Her research focuses on reducing the environmental impacts of the built environment while ensuring that it continues to support essential services for human well-being.

Using systems thinking and the concept of socioeconomic metabolism, Dr. Lanau examines how we, as societies, consume resources and generate waste to sustain themselves and develop their built environments. A key part of her work involves mapping the construction materials used for, stocked within, and discarded from the built environment. Such models result in resource cadasters that she analyzes from different angles through collaboration with experts from various fields, including urban morphology, construction management, geotechnics, and governance.

By better understanding the patterns and drivers behind our use and accumulation of construction materials, Dr. Lanau seeks to identify points of intervention to support the construction sector in moving towards more sustainable practices.

Lionel Devlieger is an engineer-architect and historian. In 2006, he co-founded Rotor with Maarten Gielen and Tristan Boniver. Rotor is a Brussels-based organisation specialised in the study of present-day material culture. Dr. Devlieger has co-authored Deconstruction et reemploi, a reference textbook on building component reuse (EPFL press, 2018) and Ad Hoc Baroque, a monograph on Marcel Raymaekers, a post-war pioneer in design with architectural salvage (Rotor, 2023). He has teached in universities across Europe and the US (UC Berkeley, TU Delft, Columbia University, the AA School). Since 2021, he is full-time Associate Professor in the material-cultural history of architectural practice at Ghent University (Belgium).

Jennifer Minner, Ph.D., is an Associate Professor in the Department of City and Regional Planning at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, USA. She directs the Just Places Lab, a transdisciplinary platform centered on how communities care for, preserve, reuse, repair, remember, and imagine places. Her research and teaching focus on equitable land use planning and climate action through the reuse and adaptation of buildings and landscapes. She is a co-founder of the Circularity, Reuse, and Zero Waste Development network. As a CR0WD partner, she works with community leaders, fellow researchers, youth, and policymakers in New York State to realize the potential for circularity, preservation, and reuse of the built environment to be transformative.