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Imane Huyghebaert

  • category
    junior researcher
  • research groups
    Architectural Engineering
    Cosmopolis Centre for Urban Research
  • keywords
    architecture
    heritage & preservation & architectural history
    engineering

Imane Huyghebaert is a PhD researcher in Sciences at the Department of Geography at the Vrije Universiteit Brussel (VUB). She works within the research groups COSMOPOLIS Centre for Urban Research and Architectural Engineering. Since April 2025, she has been part of the IRP-funded project “Re-building Brussels (1695–2025).” Her research focuses on examining the social, material, and organisational dimensions of building maintenance through multi-sited ethnography and in-depth case studies across diverse building typologies in Brussels.

Imane holds a Master’s degree in Social and Cultural Anthropology from KU Leuven, complemented by an academic background in sociology. In her master’s thesis, she developed a cultural biography of an architectural fragment, tracing its material and symbolic circulation through Brussels’ reuse market for construction materials. This strengthened her interest in how buildings and materials move, change, and take on new meanings through everyday practices.