Dr ir Gerdy Verschuure-Stuip is trained as a conservation architect at Delft University of Technology and after worked in heritage management, design and policy advice, she returned to the faculty Architecture and the Built Environment. Nowadays, she holds a PhD in Landscape architecture and is specialized in landscape architecture and urban design, heritage, landscape biography, identity, and participation and co-creation.
Global Heritage and Development
From 2025, she is the program coordinator of the renewed Global Heritage and Development, after several years of fulfilling the role of cluster coordinator, organizing interdisciplinary education and collaborations between academia and practice. Her research focuses on the one side on theory and methodologies in heritage management, like new frontiers for landscape biography, participatory methods in transformations, and multifocality and contested heritage. For the future of our rural landscapes, she is involved in research project on gender and innovations and water management.
In an interdisciplinary team, she is analysing new possibilities for landscape biography after a NWO Lorentzworkshop and multiple courses for practitioners. She is part of the new 6 year research project Traumascapes. In the past, she was involved in the organization and editorial board of the book Adaptive reuse of Water Heritage, a collaboration between the ICOMOS, UNESCO, Centre for Global Heritage and Development and others (2020). She was involved in several research projects, international conference on this topic, and other scientific output. The latest book was on Planted Avenues in the Netherlands, a cooperation between the Dutch Tree foundation and the TU Delft to help local communities have the right argumentation to prevent the felling of planted avenues.
Education
She has a strong affiliation with education, and she is teaching and coordinating course in BSc AUBS, and MSc for the master tracks Landscape architecture and Urbanism at Delft University of Technology and in the master Applied Archaeology at Leiden University. In the various courses she binds BSc and MSc student to spatial challenges in practice. “Heritage is increasingly becoming interdisciplinary. Therefore, we need to train our students to become professionals who understand what the challenges are and how the various partners in this. It’s interesting to read a thick book about an intriguing excavation, but if you cannot summarize it for the designers to use it in new dwelling, park, square of landscape, designers might choose other aspects then the archaeologist might want. That’s why academia and practice collaborate. Lately, we ask students to make redesigns for local church communities to transform their churches and the historic public space around it in the multidisciplinary minor Heritage and Design and the boards of the churches come to the faculty to listen to their plans.
Contested heritage
In the last decade, she initiated, coordinated, and taught interdisciplinary student hubs with colleagues of Leiden, Wageningen, and Amsterdam on design workshops or design charrettes as part of our collaboration Global Heritage and Development. The recurring theme is the military heritage, World War 2, and the multifocality of this contested heritage. Since 2019, Gerdy stood at the base for the collaborations between practice and academia on redesigning the Atlantikwall (The Hague-Katwijk-Noordwijk), the Prince Maurits military barracks (Ede), the rewildening of the Zuiderwaterlinie/ Southern Water Line (Breda) for the national Landscape manifestation Landschapstriennale 2021 (2020), the multifocality of Wall of Mussert (Lunteren) and so on.
Education and research combined
The collaboration on the Atlantikwall resulted in a research project, the designs for the Zuiderwaterlinie resulted in a special issue of the magazine Vaktijdschrift Groen. In times when participation and inclusive designing becomes the standard, it’s crucial to confront students with that.
Organisation
Since 2021, she is responsible for the integral education management of the department Urbanism. Previously, she was involved in the faculty board of Education and the Dutch Research school on Art History.
