The Department of Human Geography at Lund University is hiring 1-2 PhD students in human/economic geography. The students will be employed in the DECENT project (Socio-technical modularity and the decentralization of infrastructure), financed by the ERC: https://cordis.europa.eu/project/id/101219042. The students will also be affiliated with CIRCLE (Centre for Innovation Research). The positions are suitable for candidates with an interest in economic geography, innovation studies, socio-technical transitions, among others.
Cities have long relied on centralised systems for providing essential services such as electricity, water and transport. These large network-based infrastructures often fail to meet social, economic and environmental needs. The DECENT project aims to explore how decentralized infrastructure solutions, such as micro-grids, small-scale wastewater treatment, multi-modal transport, short food chains, or distributed finance, overcome the historical legacies of large-scale infrastructure systems and supply societal functions in more modular ways. The project will study decentralization from a configurational socio-technical perspective and focus on aspects such as: local and global industry dynamics, geography of innovation, sustainability transitions and/or urban experimentation. Empirically, the project will study and compare infrastructure decentralization in high- (e.g., European or North American) and middle-income (e.g., South- or Southeast Asian) cities.
More information and application form: https://lu.varbi.com/en/what:job/jobID:944946/
Deadline for applications is August 28th 2026.
