PhD Position in Collective Action for Just Transitions in Cities at TU Delft in The Netherlands
Closing Date: November 19, 2023
Job Category: PhD
Location: Delft, The Netherlands
University: TU Delft
Department: Department of Urbanism
Faculty/Division: the Spatial Planning and Strategy Section
Description:
Do you want to contribute to collective action for just transitions in cities? Are you interested in critical urban research? Do you want to be part of an interdisciplinary team of social scientists, urban planners, and urban designers that look into questions of spatial justice in sustainability transitions?
To deal with spiralling socio-ecological crises, cities are pursuing sustainability transitions across multiple sectors. Recent critical studies reveal that many urban transition interventions intended to reduce the impacts of climate change have actually intensified climate risks and pushed people and communities into further vulnerability (so-called maladaptation). Addressing maladaptation calls for long-term, integrated, cross-sectoral, and participatory governance.
In particular, a major criticism towards sustainability transitions is the strong reliance on expert knowledge. City visions and plans rely heavily on technocratic information and are seldom informed by the real experiences and aspirations of citizens and other “non-expert” human and non-human (urban) actors. These highly exclusive processes often result in business-as-usual interventions completely detached from citizens' lived experiences. Not surprisingly, they eventually reinforce existing inequalities, exacerbate climate risks, and create new forms of dispossession.
Furthermore, the absence of a shared vision for societal transformation results in a disconnection between the public and the decision-making process regarding such transitions. This disconnection frequently manifests itself through public demonstrations against planned actions and in an increase of political divisions. These concerns are further exacerbated by the dissemination of false information and the promotion of populist narratives, eventually undermining democratic processes. The incidents of COVID-19 immunisation programmes and the Dutch nitrogen issue serve as examples of such a scenario.
Pressing questions thus are: How to identify and engage groups and communities into collective climate action, particularly those less engaged and “invisible” groups, to ensure intra and intergenerational justice? How to create value-driven collective visions that are truly inclusive and really disrupt and challenge business-as-usual pathways? How to accommodate conflicting values inherent to the diversity of people and communities in urban spaces and beyond?
In this PhD project, you will explore these questions from a spatial justice perspective. You will seek new theoretical and conceptual insights and develop disruptive tools and processes to support collective action in climate adaptation. You will explore critical approaches (intersectionality, decolonialism) to analyse factors that support/hinder collective action by looking at, e.g., social movements, community initiatives, and insurgent public participation practices. You will also explore the role of values in collective vision-making and imaginaries, contrasting Western and Indigenous perspectives. Theoretical, analytical and conceptual insights will be translated into tools and processes to support collective visioning and action towards just urban transitions. Given its socio-spatial-ecological scope, the Sponge City concept will provide the empirical focus for this study. Here, a Sponge City is approached as a city in balance across spatial scales: Balance between weather extremes (flooding/heavy rainfall and drought/heat); Balance between people and nature, and Balance between past, present, and future decisions.
More information here.
