Maarten van Ham

Background

About Maarten van Ham

I am a professor of Urban Geography and my research focuses on Urban Poverty, Deprived Neighbourhoods, Segregation, Neighbourhood Effects, and Area based and People based Urban Renewal policies. But I have a wide interest and expertise in issues around urban inequalities. From August 2020 until October 2024 I was the head of the Department of Urbanism at TU Delft. In that period the department grew from 200 to over 300 staff, including PhD students. The department covers a wide range of topics from Urban Design, Landscape Architecture, Spatial Planning, 3D GeoInformation, to Environmental Modelling and Urban Studies and Urban Geography. In the same period I was also the vice-dean of the Faculty of Architecture and the Built Environment in Delft. My full CV can be found on: Details of my 5-year ERC-funded project DEPRIVEDHOODS can be found on: Recent work on increasing socio-economic segregation in European cities can be found on My research focusses on the relationships between socio-economic inequality, poverty and neighbourhoods. I work with my team on a range of research questions related to understanding residential mobility and migration, neighbourhood change, and the effects of residential environments on individual outcomes such as employment, income, school outcomes ande criminal behavior (neighbourhood effects). I have a special interest in the effect of policy on cities and neighbourhoods (such as right-to-buy and area-based policies such as social mix policies). My group specializes in the use of large individual level geo-coded longitudinal datasets and large longitudinal survey data. We work with a geo-coded longitudinal dataset with the full Netherlands population going back to 1995, and with similar data from Sweden, the UK and Estonia. Specialties: My research interests are in the fields of Economic, Population, and Urban Geography: geography of labour markets; spatial mismatch of workers and employment opportunities; spatial distribution of jobs; spatial disparities of labour market achievement; neighbourhood effects; urban and neighbourhood change; housing market behaviour and housing choice; residential mobility and migration; Tenure choice; population and household change; union formation; divorce and separation. My research is international and interdisciplinary and has been published in world-renowned geography, housing, urban economics, planning and demography journals. I have research projects in the UK, The Netherlands, Sweden, Estonia, and Lithuania.