PhD scholarship within Innovative Land Management and Urban Transformation

A scholarship is vacant at the Norwegian University of Life Sciences (NMBU), Department of Landscape Architecture and Spatial Planning, for a four-year PhD-project within the field of Innovative Land Management and Urban Transformation. The scholarship has been established as part of the cooperation between NMBU and the Norwegian State Housing Bank, by which the position is funded. 25 % of the position is allocated to mandatory duties

The Department of Landscape Architecture and Spatial Planning has its main activities within urban and regional planning, property, landscape architecture and public health. The institute has 700 students and 80 employees

Description

The PhD candidate will work with market driven urban land redevelopment processes. This will include an assessment of how business partnership, landowner cooperation, public planning and cost-sharing formulas interact and cooperate, with the efforts of creating high quality and sustainable urban re-developments.
The PhD candidate will be part of the “The Self-organizing City” research project. As a candidate, you will combine comparative case studies with developing and using behavioral game-theory models, simulations and experiments. The comparative case studies will outline similarities and particularities of market driven urban transformation. The game theory models will test strategies that promote private-private collaboration in urban transformation, under different development conditions.
As a PhD candidate you will contribute to a research project, supported by JPI Urban Europe and the Norwegian Research Council (NRC) and The Norwegian State Housing Bank, on innovative development strategies and tools that promote and stimulate the collaboration between, for example, property owners, residents, retailers and companies in taking initiatives for urban transformation. The project departs from the compact city ideas. It studies processes of transforming centrally located urban land from an outdated use into areas for new houses, retail and other activities. By studying and experimenting on processes of self-organization and planning, the project shall gain deeper understanding of cooperation and organization as instruments for reaching livable, high quality and socially inclusive redevelopments.
The project will make use of both insights from urban planning and insights from game-theoretical modelling, real-games, game simulations and experiments as used in the field of economics.
A full description of the project and frames for the PhD position is available at berit.nordahl@nmbu.no

Nr of positions available : 1