PhD: Urban provisioning systems, sufficiency behaviour, and well

EPFL, the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne, is one of the most dynamic university campuses in Europe and ranks among the top 20 universities worldwide. The EPFL employs more than 6,500 people supporting the three main missions of the institutions: education, research and innovation. The EPFL campus offers an exceptional working environment at the heart of a community of more than 18,500 people, including over 14,000 students and 4,000 researchers from more than 120 different countries.

Connecting urban systems, human behaviour, and well-being:
How can cities reduce resource use and carbon emissions while maintaining or improving human well-being? How do changes in urban provisioning systems influence citizens’ perceptions, behaviours, and everyday choices? And how do these individual changes translate into changes in resource demand and material and energy flows across urban systems?

The Laboratory for Human-Environment Relations in Urban Systems (HERUS) at the School of Architecture, Civil and Environmental Engineering (ENAC), EPFL, investigates how urban systems transform towards sustainability. A key challenge is understanding how changes in urban infrastructure and provisioning systems can be aligned with low-carbon futures, social acceptance, and human well-being.

Within a planned interdisciplinary research project in collaboration with the University of Freiburg im Breisgau, Germany, we investigate how transformations of urban provisioning systems can contribute to low-carbon futures and improved human well-being at the city scale.

The PhD project will examine how urban planning interventions and changes in provisioning systems influence citizens’ perceptions, behavioural choices, and subjective well-being. A central aim is to connect these social and behavioural dimensions with socio-metabolic research, investigating how individual behaviours translate into changes in resource demand and material and energy flows across urban systems.

The successful candidate will work in close collaboration with our partners at the University of Freiburg, as well as with the HERUS research team.

• Develop an interdisciplinary framework connecting urban provisioning systems, resource flows, citizens’ behaviour, perceptions, and well-being.
• Conduct a systematic review of urban interventions and demand-side options across key services, including housing, mobility, and public amenities.
• Develop and spatially enrich high-resolution synthetic household populations for selected case-study cities by integrating micro-census, survey, and socio-metabolic data.
• Design and conduct empirical research, including surveys, discrete choice experiments, interviews, and stakeholder workshops, to investigate citizens’ preferences and perceptions and support the co-design of urban interventions.
• Analyse how behavioural changes translate into changes in resource demand and urban socio-metabolic profiles.
• Conduct research in close collaboration with the HERUS team and project partners under the co-supervision of Prof. Claudia R. Binder and Dr. Maria Anna Hecher.
• Publish research findings in international peer-reviewed journals and present them at scientific conferences.
• Contribute to teaching and student supervision at EPFL (20%).

• An excellent MSc degree in Social Sciences, Environmental Sciences, Environmental Systems Sciences, Sustainability Science, Geography, Urban Planning, or a closely related interdisciplinary field.
• A strong interest in connecting social and behavioural perspectives with biophysical and material dimensions of urban systems.
• An interest in socio-technical transitions,…