Claudia R. Binder

The project is hosted by the Laboratory for Human-Environment Relations in Urban Systems (HERUS) at EPFL’s School of Architecture, Civil and Environmental Engineering (ENAC). It sits at the intersection of urban sustainability, human behaviour, and socio-metabolic research, asking how transformations in urban provisioning systems can support low-carbon futures while maintaining or improving human well-being. The PhD will investigate how urban planning interventions and changes in provisioning systems shape citizens’ perceptions, behavioural choices, and subjective well-being at the city scale. A central part of the work is to connect these social and behavioural dimensions with the physical metabolism of cities, linking individual choices to resource demand and to material and energy flows across urban systems. The student will work on an interdisciplinary project in collaboration with the University of Freiburg im Breisgau, Germany, and with the HERUS research team at EPFL. The research will combine systematic review work, high-resolution synthetic household population development, and empirical social-science methods such as surveys, discrete choice experiments, interviews, and stakeholder workshops. The project also includes spatial enrichment and analysis of micro-census, survey, and socio-metabolic data for selected case-study cities. The role offers the chance to contribute to an interdisciplinary and international research environment, to develop an independent research profile, and to publish and present findings in academic venues.

This PhD project at EPFL’s Laboratory for Human-Environment Relations in Urban Systems (HERUS) explores how urban sustainability transitions interact across sectors, with an initial focus on energy and food systems . The project asks when transformations in different urban sectors reinforce one another, when they create trade-offs, and when they trigger tipping dynamics. The research is embedded in the ongoing “Tipping Transition” project, which studies the drivers and dynamics of renewable energy technology adoption in housing in Lausanne. The PhD will extend an established interdisciplinary agent-based model of the Lausanne energy transition, which already integrates economic factors with social and behavioural dimensions such as attitudes and social norms over time. The successful candidate will develop a framework for analysing coupled sustainability transitions in urban systems and further develop the modelling approach to examine interactions between sectors, especially energy and food. A particular emphasis is placed on provisioning systems —the infrastructures, technologies, institutions, markets, and practices that enable or constrain sustainability transitions. The student will work closely with a current PhD researcher on the energy transition model and collaborate with the wider HERUS research team. The position offers the opportunity to build on an existing modelling framework, contribute to its expansion, and pursue research at the intersection of computational modelling, sustainability science, and urban studies under the guidance of Prof. Claudia R. Binder. The role also includes publication in peer-reviewed journals, conference presentations, and a contribution to teaching and student supervision at EPFL.