Tristan Claus
Tristan Claus is a part-time postdoctoral researcher at the Department of Mobility and Spatial Planning (AMRP) at Ghent University and a part-time research assistant in the Planning for People, Urbanity and Landscapes (P.PUL) research group at KU Leuven. After working as the national ESPON and URBACT contact point at Ghent University, he completed his PhD at the Department of Architecture at KU Leuven, focusing on how individual development interests are articulated into planning legislation. This work fostered Tristan’s strong interest in how bottom-up interactions between private and public actors can influence dominant institutional trajectories in planning systems, shaped by legitimacy challenges surrounding newly designed institutions and by mass media framing. He is currently studying these mechanisms in interactions between civil society organizations, governments, and knowledge institutions as part of the CO/ALIGN project (Driving Urban Transitions), which seeks to achieve transformative changes in mobility policy. In addition, Tristan is working on a Dutch-language publication for a broad audience based on his doctoral research.