Dr.
Thomas Verbeek
Assistant Professor (tenure track)

Information

I am a geographer and urban planner and obtained my PhD at Ghent University (2017), with a dissertation on the relation between environmental health and urban planning. Afterwards I went to the UK, where I first worked as a Research Fellow at the University of Warwick (2017-2019) on the ERC Project “Toxic Expertise: Environmental Justice and the Global Petrochemical Industry”. In 2019 I was awarded a three-year Leverhulme Fellowship in which I looked at the social justice of urban air pollution management. In 2022 I joined the Urban Studies section of the Urbanism Department at the TU Delft, on a tenure track Assistant Professor position.
My research has always focused on environment-society interactions, and I am particularly interested in just sustainabilities and just transitions. I think it is a key question how to develop and implement policies and plans that improve our local environment and reduce our carbon footprint, without unfairly distributing the costs of those policies across the population and without excluding vulnerable populations from decision processes. I want to further develop my research on this challenge and I am very interested in setting up collaborations.

Verbeek, T. and Hincks, S. (2022). The ‘Just’ Management of Urban Air Pollution? A Geospatial Analysis of Low Emission Zones in Brussels and London. Applied Geography, 140, 102642. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.apgeog.2022.102642

Verbeek, T. (2021). Explaining public risk acceptance of a petrochemical complex: a delicate balance of costs, benefits and trust. Environment & Planning E: Nature and Space, 4(4), 1413-1440. https://doi.org/10.1177/2514848620957124

Verbeek, T. (2019). Unequal residential exposure to air pollution and noise: a geospatial environmental justice analysis for Ghent, Belgium. SSM - Population Health, 7, 100340. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ssmph.2018.100340

Verbeek, T. (2018). The relation between objective and subjective noise exposure around two suburban highway viaducts in Ghent: lessons for urban environmental policy. Local Environment, 23(4), 448-467. https://doi.org/10.1080/13549839.2018.1428791

Verbeek, T. and Boelens, L. (2016). Environmental health in the complex city: a co-evolutionary approach. Journal of Environmental Planning and Management, 59(11), 1913–1932. https://doi.org/10.1080/09640568.2015.1127800

Member of International Working Group "Urban Planning for Health Equity"
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  • Mobility, transport
  • Social & cultural geography
  • Social sciences, cultural sciences, demography
  • Spatial & state & regional planning
  • Urban planning & development

Projects involved