PHD POSITION MAPPING HISTORICAL ‘BLUE’ INFRASTRUCTURES FOR URBAN HEALTH

Are you passionate about the history of the built environment, urban health and digital research methods? Join TU Delft’s History of Architecture and Urban Planning group as PhD candidate!

JOB DESCRIPTION

In this PhD position, you will adopt digital research methods to map water-related or ‘blue’ infrastructures, and link their historical and technological developments to changing urban health dynamics.
Historically, blue infrastructures and spaces have often been mapped as sources of contamination and to inform disease prevention. Think of John Snow’s famous mid-nineteenth century London cholera map. However, urban and architectural scholarship has now increasingly started focusing on the promotion of health and well-being, rather than just combatting diseases. We therefore also need more understanding of the health promoting goals of blue infrastructures, and how they have historically become so embedded in the fabric of modern cities and buildings.
Using archival sources such as disease maps, building plans and construction drawings, you will identify and map historically relevant traces of blue infrastructures, their integration on both city and building scales, and their implications for dealing with water and public health in new ways over time. This PhD project potentially starts from previously collected archival material of the Amsterdam City Archives, to further identify comparisons between the modern history of Amsterdam and other relevant international cases.

JOB REQUIREMENTS

For this full-time, fully funded PhD position, we are looking for a highly motivated candidate with:

• A Master’s degree in architectural/urban history/planning, digital humanities/computer science/geomatics, or a related discipline.
• Preferably some academic research experience post-Master level.
• Demonstrable affinity with archival sources.
• Strong skills in GIS-based research, additional experience with computer vision and machine learning is a plus.
• An independent and creative working attitude.
• Excellent oral and written proficiency in English, Dutch and any additional languages, to potentially carry out comparative research.

Doing a PhD at TU Delft requires English proficiency at a certain level to ensure that the candidate is able to communicate and interact well, participate in English-taught doctoral education courses, and write research articles and a final dissertation. For more details, please check the Graduate School’s admission requirements: https://www.tudelft.nl/onderwijs/opleidingen/phd/admission.

Please refer the Job description for details