We invite applications for a post-doctoral position in the Division of Urban design and Planning at Chalmers University of Technology in Gothenburg, Sweden. As the postdoctoral researcher you will be responsible for interdisciplinary research aiming to develop an original design-support tool promoting the integration of urban and transport design and planning in practice, towards sustainable urban development. This work will include developing integrated public transport network analysis and street network analysis, testing its performance, and exploring applications in collaboration with practitioners. You will be part of the Spatial Morphology Group (SMoG), a research group engaged in urban research within the fields of urban morphology, urban analytics, space syntax and design theory.
Information About The Department
The Department of Architecture and Civil Engineering (ACE) represents a broad field of knowledge theory ranging from engineering science to social science to the humanities and design-based, artistic research. These different perspectives enable strong interdisciplinary development in this field and a broader discussion of different aspects of sustainability. Architects and planners need to handle these challenges in their daily practice and there is a great need for new knowledge within the field.
In our research and education, three complementary knowledge traditions meet:
- Practice based knowledge and generative methods, focusing on developing sustainable urban design and planning solutions;
- Quantitative, analytical methods, focusing on describing effects of different urban strategies; and
- Critical, interpreting methods, focusing on understanding the built environment in a broader societal context.
The Division of Urban Design and Planning researches and educates in urban design and planning in all scales, from single urban spaces to larger urban landscape and entire regions, with its main focus on the built environment in relation to sustainable development. Cities and regions today are facing great challenges regarding sustainable development, with ongoing large scale urban development projects and a need to handle societal challenges such as climate change, urbanisation processes, increasing regional imbalance, segregation and gentrification processes.
Information about the project
The world is facing great challenges and with the majority of the world's population living in cities, urban planning and design play an increasingly important role for sustainable development. An important obstacle to achieve sustainable urban development is the current divide between urban planning and transport planning in both research and practice. To transform our cities towards sustainability, it is not enough to design walkable neighbourhoods, to increase public transport coverage and frequency, or to limit vehicular traffic and reduce emissions. These silo approaches run the risk of sub-optimising different transport systems separately, while not solving the conflicts created by their integration in real urban environments, nor taking advantage of their complementarity potentials, to promote more efficient, safe, inclusive, and sustainable multi- and intermodal mobility.
The project “Developing a design-support tool to integrate urban and public transport planning towards sustainable urban development” takes a step forward in facilitating the integration of urban and transport planning by developing a design-support tool integrating public transport network models with street network models. The tool will build on and extend the state-of-the-art, including multimodal centrality and accessibility analysis, for modelling sustainable mobility patterns (i.e. walking / cycling and public transport) at different scales of movement.
The Spatial Morphology Group has a long experience in modelling and analysing urban environment in relation to human mobility. It has conducted analytic and empirical studies within and across cities modelling pedestrian and bicycle movement, and multimodal urban and regional networks. Furthermore, the group has experience in developing analytic software and design support tools for urban designers (i.e. Urban Calculator, Place Syntax Tool, Space Syntax Toolkit).
The position is funded by the Chalmers Area of Advance Transport and there will be opportunities for collaboration in relevant projects.