TU Delft's History of Architecture and Urban Planning group
PhD Position Mapping Historical 'Blue' Infrastructures for Urban Health
Are you passionate about the history of the built environment, urban health and digital research methods? Join TU Delft's History of Architecture and Urban Planning group as PhD candidate!
Job description
In this PhD position, you will adopt digital research methods to map water-related or 'blue' infrastructures, and link their historical and technological developments to changing urban health dynamics.
Historically, blue infrastructures and spaces have often been mapped as sources of contamination and to inform disease prevention. Think of John Snow's famous mid-nineteenth century London cholera map. However, urban and architectural scholarship has now increasingly started focusing on the promotion of health and well-being, rather than just combatting diseases. We therefore also need more understanding of the health promoting goals of blue infrastructures, and how they have historically become so embedded in the fabric of modern cities and buildings.
Using archival sources such as disease maps, building plans and construction drawings, you will identify and map historically relevant traces of blue infrastructures, their integration on both city and building scales, and their implications for dealing with water and public health in new ways over time. This PhD project potentially starts from previously collected archival material of the Amsterdam City Archives, to further identify comparisons between the modern history of Amsterdam and other relevant international cases.
Interested? You can find all information here.
The application deadline is 13 April 2025.