​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​

Keynote Sessions

Be inspired by visionary speakers who challenge the way we think about preventive health. Explore fresh perspectives on everyday spaces by our top speakers Prof. Dr. Masi Mohammadi (TU/e) and Maarten Hajer (UU).

Prof. Dr. Maarten Hajer, Utrecht University

From Captured to Captivating Urban Futures: how futuring might help Preventive Health

In his keynote Maarten Hajer, distinguished professor of Urban Futures at the Geosciences Faculty of Utrecht University, will share the way in which futuring can bring together academics, practitioners and designers in an effort to break through the crisis of the imagination. In this he will draw on the research reflected in Neighbourhoods for the Future (2020, reprinted 2022 and 2025) and his recent Captured Futures - Rethinking the Drama of Environmental Politics (written together with Jeroen Oomen for Oxford UP). More information on the Urban Futures Studio can be found at www.uu.nl/ufs

Maarten Hajer (1962) is Distinguished Professor of Urban Futures and Director of the Urban Futures Studio at Utrecht University. Trained in Political Science and Urban & Regional Planning at the University of Amsterdam, he earned his doctorate in Politics at Oxford University. Between 2008 and 2015, Hajer served as Director of PBL, the Netherlands Environmental Assessment Agency, advising the Dutch government on sustainability and spatial policy.

Since 2015, at Utrecht University, he has led the Urban Futures Studio, an interdisciplinary platform exploring futuring: how societies imagine the future, how such imagined futures shape politics, and how images of the future become tools of power. Hajer’s research brings together discourse analysis and dramaturgy to understand the “dramaturgies of change.” His work asks how academics can contribute to navigating the current polycrisis and to addressing the legitimacy challenges surrounding the political actions needed for more sustainable and just futures.

Prof. Dr. Masi Mohammadi, Eindhoven University of Technology

Living as medicine 2040: Empathic homes & neighbourhoods as health amplifiers

Smart homes and cities must stop watching and start enabling and activating. The keynote shows how the next generation of homes and neighbourhoods become health amplifiers: salutogenic habitats that expand capability, agency and everyday wellbeing. Physical and hybrid affordances do the heavy lifting, and edge-first, artificially empathic environments act only when context truly warrants it. Static typologies give way to adaptive living forms: the Attentive Home, the Caring Cluster, and the Neighbourhood Nervous System, each tuned to everyday capability and proportionate support.

Backcasting from 2040 reframes ageing in place as thriving in place and sets a practical horizon: design that preserves personhood, infrastructures that invite movement and connection, and technology that stays local, quiet and reversible. Scaling rests on three rails: fair access, open interfaces, and alignment between civic actors and primary care, so the system helps without getting in the way. Anchored in i4PH Health@Home (2025–2040), the focus is genuine system change with equitable, stigma-free implementation, where socio-spatial infrastructure amplifies prevention, early detection and connection.

Masi Mohammadi obtained her PhD on smart homes for active ageing, is Chair of Smart Architectural Technologies at Eindhoven University of Technology, and leads the KIVI Chair Architecture in Health at HAN University of Applied Sciences in the Netherlands. As a senior researcher and project manager in various national projects in the field of smart healthy cities, she has gained extensive experience in interdisciplinary studies. In this context, she has served as chair and/or board member of more than 20 (inter)national committees and research networks, including as a member of the Science, Technology and Society Board of the Royal Netherlands Society of Engineers (KIVI), and as a visiting professor at the University of Technology Sydney.

She has contributed to numerous publications on interdisciplinary domains of smart, healthy homes and is a renowned speaker who has delivered more than 120 academic and professional keynotes or invited talks at national and international level.

Upside Down is brought to your by the Institute 4 Preventive Health - Part of the EWUU Alliance