Jérôme Chenal

This PhD project is part of VERTICAF (Vertical Africa: Visualizing Urban Change, Negotiating Power, Designing Sustainable Cities) , a comparative research initiative on urban verticalization in African cities. Based at EPFL Lausanne and linked to partnerships with the Universities of Dakar, Kigali, and Luanda, the project examines how cities in Africa are changing through vertical growth and what this means for urban futures. The doctoral researcher will focus on developing and applying methods to measure, map, and quantify urban verticality across three case-study cities: Dakar, Kigali, and Luanda . The work spans the city, neighbourhood, and building scales, with attention to historic centres, peri-urban areas, and satellite settlements. A central part of the project is building a harmonized database of vertical urban change since 2000 and creating a data processing pipeline to extract building heights over time. The research combines remote sensing, GIS, photogrammetry, geospatial analysis, and spatial databases , alongside targeted use of crowdsourced geolocated images to complement satellite observations. The student will also compile quantitative building profiles, capturing height, density, footprint, and temporal evolution for selected buildings in each city. The position sits within an interdisciplinary project that brings together spatial analysis, political science, architecture, and urban studies, with a strong emphasis on understanding the environmental, social, and political dimensions of vertical urban change in African contexts.