Post-doc posi­tion at Neuchâtel University (Switzerland) in “Surveillance Studies” and “Urban Policy Mobilities Studies”

Institute of Geography, Neuchâtel University, Espace Louis-Agassiz 1, CH-2000 Neuchâtel

We are seek­ing a postdoctoral-level scholar for an 18-months research project on “Smarter Cities: New Urban Policy Model in the Making”

Project descrip­tion

The term ‘Smarter Cities’ stands for the range of cur­rent efforts, aim­ing at the cre­ation of the ‘future city’ as an inter­con­nected, dig­i­tized and ‘tech­no­log­i­cally empow­ered’ sys­tem of con­nec­tions, processes and flows. At their core, smarter cities ini­tia­tives thus imply a world of per­fect order­ing and regulation-at-a-distance that relies, fun­da­men­tally, on the cod­ing of social life into soft­ware. Yet such processes of order­ing and soft­ware sort­ing are never neu­tral, whether the col­lec­tion, clas­si­fi­ca­tion and analy­sis of data aim at greater effi­ciency, speed, con­ve­nience or security.

The project aims to high­light a num­ber of crit­i­cal issues — and to assess their poten­tial impli­ca­tions for indi­vid­u­als and social groups — aris­ing from the orga­ni­za­tional set­tings and sit­u­ated coali­tions of author­ity under­pin­ning cur­rent efforts towards smarter cities. It does so through the empir­i­cal inves­ti­ga­tion of two ini­tia­tives devoted to the elab­o­ra­tion of novel best prac­tices and tech­nolo­gies for smarter cities: Future Cities Laboratory, a research plat­form in Singapore devel­oped by the ETH Zurich and two part­ner uni­ver­si­ties (1) and Ittigen, one of the most cov­eted test munic­i­pal­i­ties in Switzerland for the devel­op­ment of new smart city solu­tions (2).

Project inves­ti­ga­tors

Francisco Klauser & Ola Söderström, Institute of Geography, Neuchâtel UniversityJob Description
18 months con­tract
Project start: January 2012
Annual salary: 69’000 Swiss Francs

The suc­cess­ful can­di­date will be based at the Institute of Geography at Neuchâtel University. He/she will be expected to do field­work in Berne (Switzerland) and Singapore. We also encour­age PhD stu­dents who are com­plet­ing or have recently com­pleted their degree work to apply.

Required skills
Language: English, and, prefer­ably, either French or German (both writ­ten and oral)
Interest in “sur­veil­lance stud­ies” lit­er­a­ture and research, and/or knowl­edge of “urban pol­icy mobil­i­ties studies”

Closing Date & pro­ce­dures
10 September 2011

Applicants should sub­mit a CV, a let­ter describ­ing suit­abil­ity for the fel­low­ship, one writ­ing sam­ple, and the con­tact infor­ma­tion for two ref­er­ences to: Francisco Klauser, Assistant Professor, Institute of Geography, Neuchâtel University, francisco.​klauser@​unine.​ch.
Enquiries or expres­sions of inter­est should be directed to francisco.​klauser@​unine.​ch or ola.​soderstrom@​unine.​ch

Ola Söderström
Professeur
Institut de Géographie
Université de Neuchâtel
Espace Louis Agassiz 1
2000 Neuchâtel
Switzerland
Tél.: +41 32 718 17 97
http://​www2​.unine​.ch/​g​e​o​g​r​a​p​hie
http://​move​-net​work​.ch/