Maarten Hajer

Biography: Maarten Hajer is professor Urban Futures at the Faculty of Geo Sciences of Utrecht University and director of the UU Urban Futures Studio. Hajer was educated in Political Science and in Urban and Regional Planning (Universiteit van Amsterdam (UvA) and holds a D.Phil. in Politics from the University of Oxford. During the 1990s he worked with Ulrich Beck at the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universitat in Munich and as senior researcher at the Scientific Council for Government Policy (WRR), The Hague. He was appointed to the Chair of Public Policy at the UvA in 1998. The Dutch Cabinet appointed him as Director-General of the Netherlands Environmental Assessment Agency (PBL – Planbureau voor de Leefomgeving, the government think tank to the Dutch Cabinet and Parliament on issues of land use, environment and nature conservation) in 2008. During his term in government he was elected Dutch ‘Government Manager of the Year’ in 2014. His fixed seven years term as DG PBL ended in 2015 upon which he changed to Utrecht University and he started the Urban Futures Studio. In his new capacity he was Chief Curator of the 2016 International Architecture Biennale Rotterdam (IABR) and was curator of ‘Places of Hope’, an exhibition and manifestation on the future of the Netherlands, which was part of the programme of Leeuwarden/Fryslan Cultural Capital of Europe 2018. Hajer is a member of the UN’s International Resource Panel (IRP, hosted by UNEP since 2011) for which he led the working group on food systems and co-leads the working group on Cities, together with Mark Swilling (Stellenbosch). Hajer holds an Extra Ordinary Professorship at the Institute for Complex Systems in Transition at the University of Stellenbosch, South Africa and an honorary professorship at Kopenhagen University. At the UU he is the scientific director of one of four university-wide strategic themes, ‘Pathways to Sustainability’. He is the author of over many articles and books, including the acclaimed The Politics of Environmental Discourse (Oxford UP, 1995), as well as Deliberative Policy Analysis (Cambridge UP, 2003, eds. with Hendrik Wagenaar), Authoritative Governance (Oxford UP, 2009) and Smart about Cities – Visualizing the Challenge of 21st Century Urbanism (NAi/010, 2014). His new, co-authored book Neighbourhoods for the Future – A Plea for a Social and Ecological Urbanism has recently been published.