PhD position on social activity spaces (urban geography & geo data science)

This PhD project will focus on how (people in) cities and universities interact in public spaces, and how these spaces support both the social bridging between these communities, and can be leveraged in the transition to more sustainable mobility. The objectives are (1) mapping how, when and where people travel for social reasons and what the social meaning of specific places within the city and on campus is; (2) empower students as a participatory research population to analyze the social activity spaces of the university community; (3) build a university-city partnership through a similar participatory mapping of activity spaces of a residential community within the city itself; (4) identify where and why specific spaces form a social bridging role for the university-city communities. 

A successful project will result in an improved understanding of the specific role of social spaces within our larger travel behavior through a systematic mapping of social spaces within the city-university community and an analysis of how the built environment, infrastructure and institutions can support these spaces. 

Planned secondments:

• University of Tartu, Estonia (3 months during Fall 2026): Visiting fellowship at the Mobility Lab, Department of Geography. 
• Leuven MindGate (3 months during Fall 2025): Contribution to the development of an ‘innovation business card’ for the Leuven region: an infographic, charter signed by different sectors, mapping of urban innovation ecosystem and visualized on website, including potentially contributing to the automatization of data sources to develop these tools. 

The selected candidate will be part of the SUNSET Doctoral Network built around a community of leading scholars and 10 doctoral candidates (DCs) delivering insights into how universities and their host cities can collaborate and interact to achieve the digitalization and sustainability goals set out by current European and global policy agendas. The network is purposefully international, intersectoral, and interdisciplinary. It consists of 6 academic and 16 non-academic partners in 5 European countries (Belgium – The Netherlands – Finland – Norway – Estonia). SUNSET emphasizes cooperative research and includes international mobility and intersectoral secondments to maximize the career potential of all DCs.