진학프로석·박사 채용 접수 플랫폼

Help to accelerate the transition to a circular Netherlands by co-creating and designing an agent-based model of the Metropolitan Region of Amsterdam (MRA).

The world is facing many ecological and political challenges, many of them rooted in the linear, extractive systems of resource use in present-day society. As a result, these challenges throw up many questions about the future of society and cities. One widely agreed-upon necessity is the transition to a circular society, a society that is not extractive but that systematically reuses its resources. In this PhD, you will contribute to visions of a circular future, particularly in an urban context.

Our multi-disciplinary NWA project ‘Accelerating the Circular Transition’ (ACT!) develops a systemic approach to accelerate the fair transition to a circular society in The Netherlands (and beyond). It will co-create an integrated approach to manage this complex transition, building a toolbox of shared visions of and for a circular society with societal well-being at its centre. For this, the consortium consists of a large variety of scientific researchers from different disciplinary backgrounds, as well as stakeholders from all parts of Dutch society, including (national, regional and local) government, industry, and local NGO’s.

Your main contribution will be the development of a spatially explicit agent-based model of the society of the Metropolitan Region of Amsterdam, simulating circular behaviour and interactions with the social and physical environment. In order for you to design such a model you will (also) contribute to 1) expanding the inventory of circular behaviours and initiatives in the MRA (in particular, reuse, repair and sharing), based on a meta-analysis of existing projects, policy information and evaluations, and academic research, 2) evaluating drivers and barriers for different activities, population groups, and neighbourhoods and towns within the MRA, partly based on co-creation sessions and behavioural experiments and 3) collecting and connecting relevant (spatial) datasets.

Your duties and responsibilities include:

• • Develop and Agent-Based model (ABM) of a circular society, with input from citizens in the Metropolitan Region of Amsterdam.
• • Connect to citizens and other stakeholders, such as ‘Repair Café’s’, to retrieve their experiences and expectations from a circular society.
• • Design and conduct behavioural (choice) experiments to inform the ABM.
• • Interact with macro-modellers so they can connect their models to the ABM.

The research is embedded within the chair Urban Economics https://www.wur.nl/en/chair-groups/section-economics/urban-economics and, which is led by Prof. Eveline van Leeuwen https://www.linkedin.com/in/eveline-van-leeuwen-a13b894/. You will be co-supervised by Anne van Valkengoed (UEC) and Kasper Lange from the Amsterdam University of Applied Sciences (HvA). Furthermore, part of the time, you will be a Research Fellow at the Amsterdam Institute for Advanced Metropolitan Solutions (AMS), here, Gerard Roemers will help with the connections to the societal partners of the project.