Ananda Kohlbrenner (ULB) at the EAUH 2026 Conference “City Networks in Europe and Beyond”

From 2 to 5 September 2026, Ananda Kohlbrenner will take part in the international conference of the European Association for Urban History (EAUH) in Spain. Entitled City Networks in Europe and Beyond, this year’s biennial conference is one of the leading interdisciplinary forums dedicated to urban history and urban studies.

Bringing together historians, geographers, sociologists, anthropologists, art and architectural historians, as well as urban planners, the EAUH Conference gathers several hundred researchers and professionals across more than one hundred sessions. Its aims include fostering comparative research, exploring new directions in urban studies and encouraging future international research collaborations.

Trained in social sciences, history and urban planning, Ananda Kohlbrenner develops a research practice at the intersection of environmental history, Science and Technology Studies (STS) and urban history. After studying wastewater and stormwater management, as well as participatory and low-tech responses to flood risks in Brussels, since 2020 she has been exploring the complexity of urban soils and the forms of life they sustain through the lens of political ecology.

Making urban soils visible

As part of the plenary session Images and Narratives of Post-industrial Urban Spaces, Ananda Kohlbrenner will present Drawing the Underworld: Creating Attentive Relationships with Brussels’ Soils.

Her contribution draws on the findings of Super terram, a research project conducted at the Faculty of Architecture of the Université libre de Bruxelles (ULB) in partnership with architecture practice 51N4E and non-profit organisation BRAL, with the support of Innoviris.

Drawing on collective representation experiments conducted on the Schaerbeek-Formation railway brownfield in Brussels, the research begins with a simple observation: to meaningfully integrate soils into planning processes, we must first find ways of making visible and perceptible what is happening within them.

Drawing and representing the often invisible life of soils thus becomes a means of renewing the way these spaces are perceived and of considering them as genuine matters of architectural, urban and civic concern.