Ronald Woudstra

My formal education as an urban and regional planner began in 2005 at Utrecht University in The Netherlands. However, cities have long fascinated me.

As a participant in the Faculty of Geosciences' Honors Program, I studied the effectiveness of small, strategic investments in public spaces in low-income neighborhoods in Bremen, Emden and Rotterdam as catalysts for improving social cohesion and sparking further investments in these neighborhoods. The study, which compared a Dutch city with two German counterparts, was funded by the EU's Interreg, an initiative that aims to stimulate cooperation between regions in the European Union. The experience sparked an interest in public spaces and the role they play in communities.

As a senior-year exchange student, I studied landscape architecture at the University of Florida, and researched the regulation of urban development under the 1985 Growth Management Act. Upon graduation, I started a master's degree in City and Regional Planning at the Brooklyn-based Pratt institute, where I focused my curriculum on transportation planning and urban design. Whilst living in Brooklyn, I held an internship with The Street Plans Collaborative, a planning and design consulting firm led by Next-Gen new urbanists and opinion leaders Mike Lydon and Anthony Garcia. At Street Plans, I worked on the Tactical Urbanism booklets, a survey of short-term urban interventions with the potential to catalyze long-term change. I also worked on the Open Streets Guide, a survey of all North American open streets initiatives known at the time. The guide compared the organization, financing and programming of a wide array of initiatives across the US and Canada that involved temporary street closures to vehicular traffic (to the benefit of pedestrians and cyclists). Through my design work at Street Plans, I supported the firm's work on numerous bicycle (master) plans and placemaking projects, amongst them the Westminster, CO, Bicycle Master Plan, updates to the Miami Bicycle Master Plan, and smaller placemaking projects.

Returning to The Netherlands after graduation, I became employed at the technology firm ARS Traffic and Transport Technology, where worked on several traffic studies and contributed to the monitoring and evaluation of a major experimental traffic demand management policy in the south of The Netherlands. I currently work for the Ministry of Finance in The Hague. Always open to new opportunities