Our society needs a vision for a future that is made by and starts from people. Local communities are the foundation of human society and the way in which our cities and communities are governed determines how we look forward to our future. […]
Are we really experiencing a democratic crisis or a crisis of democracy? What is wrong with our system? Trust in the system, in governments and in government administrations seems to be rapidly decreasing in many parts of the world. Ideologies are not clear anymore because they are not adapted to […]
Cities of People is partner of the Creative Bureaucracy Festival on 20 and 21 September 2019 in Berlin | Your advantage On September 20-21, 2019, thought leaders and innovators from within the public sector from Germany and across the world will reunite at Berlin Humboldt University for two intense days […]
On Friday the 13th of September 2019 the very first edition of the Creative Bureaucracy Festival in Belgium will be organised. This Festival is part of the International Movement of Creative Bureaucracy that started at the initiative of international expert on creativity and imagination, Charles Landry.
One of the lessons that I have learned during my period in public service is that only few people have the natural ability to develop, to formulate and to operationalise a true long term vision. It is a personal skill that can be developed and trained but government organisations today […]
With the support of Charles Landry, author of ‘The Creative Bureaucracy’, we are starting up the Belgian chapter of the Creative Bureaucracy Movement. This movement has started in September 2018 with the organization of the Creative Bureaucracy Festival in Berlin ( https://en.creativebureaucracy.net/ ) and managed to attract about 1200 participants with a […]
This paper was written in preparation of the EURICUR (European Institute for Comparative Urban Research) kick-off seminar in Ghent, June 27 2016. I wrote this paper from the perspective of the city that I was working for at the time and some of the points might be dated after two […]
This is a translation into English of an article the I wrote in Dutch a while back. It was originally written for Impuls, the journal of the Flemish Expertise Centre for Municipal Managers. It was published in the September 2015 edition of the journal and intended to be an introductory […]
Ik ben 21 jaar ambtenaar geweest. En nee, ik deed het niet omwille van de werkzekerheid, het hoge pensioen of enig ander voordeel dat veel mensen associëren met het openbaar ambt. Ik was – en ben nog steeds – een idealist, die vanuit zijn rol een steentje wou bijdragen tot […]
For some reason I am being presented at a lot of conferences as a ‘smart cities expert’. True, I know one or two things about cities. And I have also been involved in the evolution of the smart denomination that precedes the word city. But my point of view has […]
Last week I had the honour of being invited to speak at a conference in the European Parliament in Brussels with the title: “Saving the Internet for the Many not the Few”. This conference was organised by the MEPs of the S&D group in the European Parliament and brought together […]
English (UK) 
Nederlands (België)