1 PhD position on Decision Support Tool for Swiss Future CITY LABORATORY / SWISS FCL in Switzerland | ETH Zürich

Aim: The project goal is to develop a holistic tool that can be used to evaluate different development scenarios and strategies for Switzerland, to coordinate activities across different disciplines and political decision-making levels, and to provide recommendations for better coordinated planning of the built environment in Switzerland. Using an economic framework, the tool will include amongst other factors, demography, planning of land use, urban design, integrated infrastructure, energy, traffic and transportation.

Approach: The PhD position is a part of a project aimed at preparing tools that are adapted to the needs for simulations of spatial planning, including the built environment, in the fields of architecture, energy and traffic. To achieve this goal, additional geo-referenced data will be incorporated into the existing in-house software, and analysis models will be designed to allow planning interventions. It will include geo-referenced data types, with information of relevant parameters for the spatial, economic, energy, logistic and visual assessment of buildings and urban elements. Further, models and algorithms will be used to relate economic assessment to planning, and to quantify the revenue generation for investors and developers under different possible scenarios.

Existing tools: The project will be based on in-house developed software for planning of infrastructure systems (EnerPol). Using this tool policymakers can assess the most favorable approaches for policies that are best tailored to address local economic conditions, and that ensure that the development of the necessary energy transmission and operational infrastructure. It will also use “Switzerland an Urban Portrait” and “Visualization Dome” developments of ETH Zurich.

Responsibilities:

Translating urban design tools into digital representation of integrated infrastructure through modeling.

Modeling urban design related economic and societal aspects.

Setting up a spatial decision-making support tool including visual language establishment.

The planned project duration with respective evaluation steps is four years.

Interested candidates should meet following requirements to be eligible for the present PhD position:

• A Master in Architecture, Urban Planning, or equivalent.
• Excellent written and verbal English and German required
• 2-3 prior years of full-time work experience in urban design required
• Excellent design and programming skills
• Interest in big data, engineering, IT, and systems thinking
• Entrepreneurial, application-oriented
• This position involves collaboration in a joint project at ETH Zurich, Urban -Think Thank and ETH Zurich, Laboratory for Energy Conversion, under the supervision of Prof. Hubert Klumpner, Prof. Alfredo Brillembourg and Dr. Anna Gawlikowska.