The inaugural BeNeLux Geography Conference took place in April 2026, with Sabine Dörry, RSA Ambassador to Luxembourg, serving on the organising committee. The conference brought together the geographical communities of the Netherlands, Belgium, and Luxembourg for the first time in this format, drawing over 500 participants including early career researchers (ECRs), senior academics, and policymakers. It was designed to provide a platform for presenting and debating the latest work in geography, spatial planning, and policymaking, while also creating space for informal exchange, networking, and career opportunities. You can read the conference report here.
The Regional Studies Association sponsored the BeNeLux Geography Early Career Initiative Award. This award invited early career scholars to propose initiatives that carry forward the conference’s spirit of cross-border geographic exchange and community-building across the Benelux and beyond.
We are delighted that the BeNeLux Organising Committee has selected Vishavjeet Dhanda as one of the winners for their proposal, “Streets in Common”.
Vishavjeet is a doctoral research scholar in the Department of Geography, University of Delhi (Delhi School of Economics). Vishavjeet explains their research:
My work sits at the intersection of geography, urban studies, and Global South urbanism, with a particular interest in urban informality and the everyday spatial practices that formal governance tends to overlook or erase. My doctoral research focuses on Delhi’s footpath vendors, the tea stalls, juice shops, and small eateries that quietly sustain everyday urban life even as they are periodically displaced. I read them as social infrastructure rather than incidental clutter and I examine the infrastructural ambivalence through which governance simultaneously tolerates and excludes these informal livelihoods. My interests also extend to non-metropolitan and Southern urban theory. Beyond this project, what sparks my interest in the city is making sense of spatialities and temporalities across species, and, in some form, a guilty pleasure I carry into rural spatialities too, even though it’s not something I work on much.
Project: “Streets in Common”
“Streets in Common” is a four-episode digital townhall series that brings together eight geographers: four from the Global South and four from the BeNeLux region, spanning three career stages, from PhD scholars to associate professors, to share anecdotes, fieldwork experiences, and reflections on everyday urban spaces. Each open-access online episode pairs a scholar from each region to lead a discussion on a shared theme, from footpaths and street livelihoods to ethnographic method and the experience of fieldwork, before opening the discussion to the full group and the audience.
The project is conceived as a platform for doctoral scholars and early career researchers to learn from the intricacies of the research process, a conversation given far less attention than theorisation and output. Fieldwork discussions tend to centre on findings, while the granular, often improvised work of getting there: negotiating access, handling data, adapting to disruption, remains under-discussed. Pairing scholars across career stages and regions makes room for researchers to compare notes on how their questions, methods, and everyday struggles evolve over time. Recorded and published on YouTube, the series leaves a lasting, public-facing record of the community built around the 2026 BeNeLux Geography conference, one that students, practitioners, and future scholars can keep returning to.