Anke Van Hal

Prof. Anke van Hal, Ph.D., MSc is professor Sustainable Building & Development at the Center for Entrepreneurship & Stewardship at Nyenrode Business Universiteit (since January 2008) and professor Sustainable Housing Transformation at the Faculty of Architecture of the Delft University of Technology (since November 2007).

In 1989 she graduated with honors at the Department of Architecture of the Delft University of Technology. For four years, she worked for the municipality of Delft in the capacity of Employee Sustainable Building, and was as such responsible for the sustainable building policy of the municipality and involved in a number of demonstration projects. From 1993 to 1996 she worked as a senior consultant for the environmental research and design firm BOOM in Delft. In this capacity too, she was closely involved in different demonstration projects in the field of sustainable building.

In October 2000 she obtained her doctorate on a thesis titled ‘Beyond the demonstration project, the diffusion of environmental innovations in housing.''

During her studies, she combined her technical work with journalistic activities. In 1995 she and some colleagues started the technical journal Sustainable Building (Duurzaam Bouwen). Until September 2005 she was chief editor of this journal, which was later named Pure Building (Puur Bouwen). She was the chief editor of the biannual consumer magazine Pure Living (Puur Wonen) and co-initiator/organizer of the annual Pure Living Relay (Puur Wonen Estafette). She worked as an editor at the internationally oriented English technical journal Sustainable Building.

From September 2000 till November 2007 Anke van Hal worked for her own agency that aimed to bridge the gap between building and consumers. The main goal of this firm was to use market demand to promote environmentally friendly and healthy building and housing products. In 2001 she left for the East Coast of the United States to research the market opportunities for sustainable house-building. Since her return in the summer of 2002 till the moment she started working at the universities, she worked for government agencies (both municipal and federal), educational and research institutes, publishers, architects, project developers, realtors, housing associations, congress organizations and private customers.

As a professor, she developed a sustainable business approach (the Merger of Interests) which covers most of her work. Her main interest is the challenge of a (sustainable) transformation of existing dwellings and neighborhoods. In this regard she initiated the knowledge platform HomeMates. This platform has as goal to ask attention for ‘the third success factor’ of energy friendly renovation processes (besides affordable costs and well-functioning technology) and to integrate knowledge of human sciences into housing renovation practices. Many of her master classes can be found at this platform. Her recent research is also mainly focused on this ‘third success factor’. 

As one of the initiators of Parallel52, the Dutch Canadian Sustainable Building & Planning network, Anke van Hal spends a lot of time in Canada.  Amongst others, she taught at Ryerson University. Inspired by her Canadian experiences she started focusing on the overall improvement of so called ‘complex neighborhoods’ (neighborhoods with a combination of technical and social challenges) by combining the expertise and knowledge of sustainable building and social work specialists.
Anke is a member of the Supervisory Board of Triodos Real Estate Fund. She is chair of the jury of the National Building Award (Nationale Bouwprijs) and a member of several other juries and advisory boards. Till 2016 she was for eight years member of the board of the Dutch Green Building Council. She wrote several books and many articles and blogs. 

Research Chair - Sustainable Building & Development

Introduction
The chair Sustainable Building and Development of the Center for Entrepreneurship & Stewardship is led by Professor Anke van Hal. Its aim is to help the building industry make a profit by integrating sustainability into its daily activities and developing new thinking and working methods which make a choice for environment-friendly measures more appealing to all parties involved. Working towards “a merger of interests,” as Van Hal and her colleagues prefer to call this.

To achieve this goal they developed the Merger of Interest Perspective and Approach. This perspective and approach are also applicable to other disciplines than the building industry and are used in various courses of Nyenrode Business Universiteit. Chain collaboration and leadership are key elements in this method.

The building-focused team operates within a large network of academics from various disciplines and focus on the whole construction industry, from urban projects to smaller projects. However, special attention is paid to two specific fields of interest: the preservation of monumental and historically important buildings and the improvement of existing houses and neighborhoods. The knowledge platform HomeMates is initiated by the chair Sustainable Building and Development to improve the chances of success of renovation projects with high energy ambitions (www.homemates.nl)