Are you passionate about shaping sustainable and fair cities through technology and citizen engagement? We are looking for a postdoctoral researcher to join an international research initiative that helps European cities reimagine and manage their public spaces to become more liveable, inclusive, and climate neutral.
The project brings together universities, municipalities, and industry partners across Europe to develop and test digital and participatory tools that support urban transformation. It focuses on integrating AI-supported design, digital twins, and data-driven management to balance mobility, energy, and public space use—while embedding fairness and inclusion in decision-making.
Within this framework, TU/e contributes to the development of immersive co-design environments that combine Virtual Reality (VR), Cognitive Digital Twins (DTs), and a Social Fairness framework. These tools will allow cities to visualise design alternatives, assess equity impacts in real time, and support evidence-based and fair decision-making for climate-neutral transitions
InformationAs a postdoctoral researcher, you will work in an interdisciplinary team to develop immersive co-design environments that connect citizen experience, simulation data, and fairness evaluation. You will:
- Design and test VR environments that represent alternative configurations of urban space (e.g. street reallocation, mobility hubs, or green corridors).
- Identify and integrate relevant data streams from cognitive digital twins, ensuring that scenarios include measurable indicators for social fairness assessment.
- Organize and facilitate participatory workshops where citizens and decision-makers experience and evaluate different urban scenarios in VR.
- Collect and process data from these sessions, combining objective indicators (e.g., space use, accessibility, emissions) with subjective responses (e.g., behavioural, emotional, cognitive).
- Analyse and model the data to explain patterns of preference, acceptance, and perceived fairness across diverse city contexts.
- Feed insights and modelling results back into the digital twin environment to refine and validate future scenarios.
- Produce scholarly and practice oriented outputs including journal publications and policy briefs.
- Contribute to planning, documentation, monitoring, ethics/data management, and reporting to funding bodies.
You will be working with the
Urban Planning and Transportation chair (UPT) chair within the Department of the Built Environment. The group conducts research on sustainable urban development, human-centered mobility, spatial planning, and decision support systems, combining analytics, behavioural modelling, and design-driven approaches to better understand and plan for resilient, inclusive, and climate-neutral cities.
Within the CORESpaces project, you will work closely with another postdoctoral researcher at TU/e from the Technology, Innovation & Society (TIS) group, who focuses on the Social Fairness Tool, ensuring that immersive experiences and fairness indicators are fully integrated.