Postdoctoral Researcher - Regio Deal Towns

Postdoctoral Researcher - Regio Deal New Towns

Help municipalities tackle their growing physical-social and socioeconomic challenges in former Dutch New Towns-bridging research, practice and policy to create lasting public impact.

Bring science and practice together, investigate how municipalities can address complex socio-spatial challenges in an integrated way and create genuine societal impact. Dutch public organisations such as municipalities operate in an increasingly complex and dynamic environment. Globalisation, rapid technological developments, and societal changes require organisations to perform reliably and to adapt continuously, while facin a decrease in resources. Which new ways of working and organisational capabilities do municipalities need te develop to successfully address complex societal and spatial challenges in an integrated way?

In this project, you will investigate this transdisciplinary question, working closely with three municipalities:
Capelle aan den IJssel, Nissewaard, and Zoetermeer, partners of the "Regio Deal New Towns". Many neighbourhoods in these former New Towns were developed during the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s in response to the large housing shortages. Today, these municipalities face a set of intertwined physical, social and economic challenges, such as a relatively uniform, ageing housing stock, deteriorating public spaces and infrastructures, decreasing residential attractiveness, eroding social cohesion, and growing socioeconomic inequalities.

The number of low-income households is increasing and many young people are growing up in vulnerable circumstances. Addressing these challenges requires municipalities to develop new capabilities and new ways of collaborating across departments, together with other public actors, housing associations, developers, and of course residents. Through the Regio Deal New Towns, these three municipalities have committed to jointly exploring and developing more integrated and effective approaches to these complex societal and spatial challenges, in collaboration with Delft University of Technology and Erasmus University Rotterdam (in the Resilient Delta initiative).

In this postdoc position, you will genuinely be a transdisciplinary researcher, simultaneously participating in municipal projects and carrying out academic research. You will investigate how municipalities address the tensions between social, governance and spatial issues in specific local projects aimed at increasing the quality of the living environment. On average, you will spend one or two days per week at one of the municipalities and the remainder of your time at Delft University of Technology.

The successful candidate will join the Urban Studies section at the Department of Urbanism in the Faculty of Architecture and the Built Environment. Consisting of a group of highly interdisciplinary (spatially-oriented) scholars, this section studies the interactions between people and their built environments, and the effects of urban design on their behaviour.

The postdoc project is conducted in strong collaboration with researchers from The Hague University of Applied Sciences and Erasmus University Rotterdam.

More specifically, the tasks of the postdoc will include:

• Develop and conduct academically sound and practice-relevant research into the specific New Town challenges, their proposed solutions, and the related governance challenges;
• Collaborate closely with the selected municipality and translate scientific research and insights into practical applications, but also the other way round;
• Collaborate and exchange with the involved researchers at the Haagsche Hogeschool and Erasmus University Rotterdam;
• Organise and facilitate workshops and reflection sessions, contributing to collaborative and transdiciplinary knowledge development under the principle of "learning together, developing together";
• Publish articles in both peer-reviewed academic journals and practitioner magazines;
• Present your research at national and international academic and practitioner conferences and actively develop your (academic and practitioner) network.

This position is very well suited for candidates who want to bridge and integrate scientific research, creative practices and governance transformations, and who are not afraid of a bit of uncertainty and complexity. Applicants must have:

• A PhD degree in a relevant field, e.g. urban geography, urban planning, innovation studies, (social) design…