Jean
Ruegg
Jean Ruegg is Professor Emeritus at the University of Lausanne.
Hendrikje
Alpermann
Geographies of Architecture
Actor-Network-Theory
Urban Studies
Hendrikje’s PhD investigates relations between architecture, urban transformation and urban planning after socialism. It describes the life of empty tower blocks in Halle-Neustadt (East Germany) as being on standby since the late 1990s and makes suggestions on how we can understand such mode along temporal, material and organisational axes. The focus of her study is on processes of (un-)making possible futures within the planning department of the local municipality. Turning to modes of future-making and paying particular attention to socio-material and temporal relations, her project contributes to research in architectural geography and research on techno-political modes of organizing urban transformation and urban vacancy.
Moritz F.
Fürst
Science and Technology Studies
Maintenance and Repair Studies
Social Science Energy Research
Building Research
Infrastructure
Moritz’s thesis investigates the work of heating, ventilation, and air conditioning (HVAC) service technicians as agents of urban energy systems transformation. The title of his thesis is ‘Taking Care of Heating, Ventilation and Air Conditioning in Times of Energy Transition: Or How Repair and Maintenance Shape Energy Infrastructure‘. His research aims to understand how repair and maintenance work enables current indoor climate regimes assembled around standardized notions of comfort and convenience, shapes everyday engagements with thermal infrastructure, and contributes to less (and more) energy-intense ways of life. The project documents and describes technical routine and emergency interventions on HVAC installations, and technicians’ interactions with users, dwellers, property owners, work colleagues, specialists and superiors that characterize this domain of work.
Maedeh
Hedayatifard
Land Management
Coastal Area Planning
Legal Geography
Space Production
Maedeh is currently working on a research project entitled ‘The Genealogical Analysis of Land Policy Instruments for Environmental Preservation in Iran‘. Previously from 2020 to 2021, she conducted a research project entitled ‘Designing Community Garden and its Governance Structure in Pardis New Town‘.
Irem
Ince Keller
Legal Geography
Urban Studies
Risk Management
Actor-Network Theory
Irem’s PhD project aims at identifying and analyzing the role of uncertainty in risk management (RM) by investigating the mutual interaction of people, place, and law linked to risk management strategies. Her research explores a change in the law of managing seismic risks in Turkey, which came into effect shortly after the earthquake disaster in Oct 2011. Eight years after the enactment of this law, her main motivation is to answer how the city –and its heterogeneous network of relations among human and nonhumans – responds to seismic risks and to a law change linked to earthquake risk management strategies.
Maurice
Yip
Legal Geography
Territorial Planning
Global Urban Studies
Maurice’s thesis project is entitled ‘Geographical Explanation of Sharing Urbanism‘. Contributing to the literature of legal geography, this project on the rise of coworking spaces in the Global East cities aims at explaining why and how the rhetoric of sharing is rearranging property relations in the city, so that his work can practically explore the implications of the sharing urbanism for territorial planning and conceptually clarify the meaning of urban commoning.
Informing Futures