Jeroen Janssen
Place strategy · Housing · Amsterdam

Experience is not soft. It is causal.

How people live, decide, recover and perform is shaped by the systems they operate inside. I work with founders, developers, investors and boards to make sure those systems can carry the ambitions placed on them — increasingly, in housing and living environments.

Working through Liven World/ REDE/ User-Centered Real Estate/ Independent advisory
Credentials MIT alumnus/ Forbes Technology Council
02 / Thesis

Housing is not real estate. It is infrastructure for human life.

For years I worked inside large organisations where one pattern kept repeating. We invest heavily in plans, structures and assets — and underestimate the lived reality required to make them work over time. That gap is where risk accumulates.

The home is the most repeated environment in a person's life. It shapes behaviour, focus, recovery and wellbeing every single day. Small systemic decisions here compound into large outcomes over decades. Experience is not branding. It is not decoration. It is infrastructure.

03 / Practice

One practice. Three vehicles.

The practice — assessing whether the systems around a place can carry the ambitions placed on them — runs through three vehicles, each addressing a different layer of the same question.

Venture 01 — Residential

Liven World

Co-founded 2025. Develops next-generation residential environments designed around how people actually live. Living infrastructure, een thuis voor iedereen.

livenworld.nl
Venture 02 — Architecture

REDE

Resident Experience Design. An independent conceptual platform on experience as system architecture. Built around lives, not just buildings.

rede.design
Venture 03 — Speaking

User-Centered Real Estate

A keynote platform focused exclusively on high-impact talks for developers, investors and public-sector leaders.

usercenteredrealestate.com
04 / Approach

Four systems. One lived reality.

Most under-performance in housing does not happen in the plan or the asset. It happens in the systems around them — organisational, spatial, behavioural and capital. I work across all four, in this order.

01 — Organisational

Who decides, who pays, who lives with it.

Most under-performance starts in the org chart, not the building. Decision rights and accountability before anything else.

System 01
02 — Spatial

The environments people actually operate inside.

Plans get drawn for opening day. Lived experience demands they hold under daily, decade-long use.

System 02
03 — Behavioural

How people live, decide, recover, perform.

The lived reality the rest of the system has to serve. If the model can't be lived, the model is the bug.

System 03
04 — Capital

How returns are modelled, on what horizon.

Hold periods that ignore lived experience destroy long-term value. Capital design and life design are the same problem.

System 04
05 / Writing

Notes on housing, systems and lived reality.

Short essays for people deploying capital, attention and ambition into the places other people will live in. Read on Substack or by email.

06 / Advisory

Three ways to bring me in.

Beyond Liven World, REDE and the speaking platform, I take a small number of independent advisory engagements each year — typically with founders, developers, investors and boards in housing and adjacent place-making.

Mode 01

Diagnostic

A 4–6 week pre-investment read. Assess whether the systems being built can carry the ambitions placed on them. Used by IC members and boards before committing.

4–6 weeks · fixed scope
Mode 02

Advisory

Embedded across pre-development, design and pre-opening. Co-owns the lived-experience model with the development and operating teams.

6–12 months · retainer
Mode 03

Board / fractional

A standing seat on the small set of decisions that compound over decades. By referral.

Ongoing · by referral
The question

How do we build places where people can actually live well over time?

Selective inquiries for 2026. Limited capacity in Q1 2027.