PRR Project

Summary

Context and rationale for the hiring need | The constant new challenges and disruptive events that the world has been facing are reaching a critical point, requiring urgent, bold and transformative actions as an attempt to shift the world towards a resilient and sustainable path. United Nations also highlight that urban areas in particular have been dealing, for example, with a challenging and unbounded growth which is endangering humanity conditions and increasing the number of people living in vulnerable situations. This imposes a sense of urgency in the development of new management practices and in the improvement of the planning instruments for territories and their resources.National and international trends show the worldwide growing and fast urbanization, with the majority of the world´s population living in urban areas. Consequently, Agenda 2030 recognizes that sustainable urban development and management is crucial world’s population quality, declaring to be imperative to reduce inequalities and social exclusion (SDG10) and to make territories and urban settlements inclusive, safe, resilient and sustainable (SDG11).Concurrently, people and territories are more globally interconnected than ever before, while also increasing unimaginable forms of comfort/entertainment. Such contrast seems to be an opportunity for transformation towards sustainable futures to happen, giving an alternative possibility for a fair and equitable planet, bringing a new wave of inspiration and willingness to encourage people to innovate and change the way they see, interpret and tackle territorial challenges faced.In this context, social innovation (SI) emerges as a way to address these current social, economic, environmental and political challenges, being an opportunity for action through novel and socially-driven initiatives aiming for social inclusion, population empowerment (SDG10) and transformation of the territory where SI occurs towards a resilient and sustainable path (SDG11).This shows the need to deepen research and to promote novel teaching curricular units focused on SI and territorial sustainability and resilience. Position importance for IST-ID CiTUA| CiTUA has been attempting to contribute to the development of related themes (eg. spatial justice, urban planning/management, sustainable infrastructures), however there is still a lack of a robust scientific and pedagogical frameworks around these themes, which still require to be strengthened. Filling in such gap would allow to mobilize areas of knowledge that are very complex and somehow dispersed in the academia, contributing to the achievement of national/international development goals and enriching the scientific community around the sustainability and resilience of just and innovative territories, their dynamics, symbioses and conflicts. This opportunity would also strengthen CiTUA’s capability of promoting comprehensive research efforts and integrative teaching to face the complex challenges and opportunities ahead. Researcher functions| The hired researcher is expected to develop work accordingly to a set of tasks, which include: development of research on SI and territorial sustainability and resilience, exploring dynamics, synergies and conflicts with other scientific areas of the Institution; development of area-related project applications for national/international funding; supervision of graduate and postgraduate students or grant holders; publication of scientific papers in international peer review journals; organisation of a scientific international conference distinguished in the areas of SI or territorial planning; teaching MSc/PhD level courses on these thematic which will contribute to enhance IST Environmental Engineering and Urban and Spatial Planning MSc/PhD programs. Scientific profile| The candidate for this position shall have a strong background in engineering and management or related courses as well as experience in the development of applied research and in the studying of SI-related theory, demonstrated through: MSc/PhD research; participation in national/international research projects; publication of scientific papers in international peer review journals; supervision of students. The candidate must also present a scientific and pedagogical framework showing the potential to develop the identified tasks, contributing to the IST-ID CiTUA teaching and research activities level of excellence. Hiring process| IST-ID will launch an international competition to hire the most talented researcher for this position. This will be largely advertised through national/EU platforms/web portals. Specific requirements will be established in the announcement, including: research recognized by scientific community through the publication, in the last 10 years of, at least, 3 or more publications for the competition disciplinary field; knowledge transfer and scientific; pedagogical project on SI and territorial sustainability and resilience.