Active mobility means all mobility forms, including direct involvement of the human body (walking, cycling, using public transport). Active mobility can improve climate and health benefits and strengthen investments in public transport, providing a compelling environmental and economic alternative to the current subsidies supporting motorized transport. At the same time, it is a collective challenge. Traditionally car-dependent territories, such as foothill areas of the Veneto Region, exploring forms of active mobility can be a way to improve strategies of territorial regeneration and landscapes integration to foster more site-specific strategies, effective policies and design solutions. Promoting active mobility involves challenges and opportunities associated with implementing soft infrastructures related to public spaces, and minor mobility networks (municipal roads, dirt roads, cart tracks, embankments) reconsidering the spatial structure and the social practices. This condition allows for the main object of the PhD program, which focuses on considering the territory and its anthropic system (built - infrastructural) consisting not only of “areas” but also of “layers” (spaces - data) and dynamics (social - economical) playing different and synergistic roles in the functioning of a vast inhabited territory, basic elements for rethinking scenarios to develop more sustainable and healthy spaces and standards.

Candidates should preferably have an academic background in civil engineering, architecture, human geography, politics or design sciences, ability to handle GIS and analyze datasets and to perform both quantitative and qualitative research in social sciences. Fluency both in English and Italian is recommended.

The PhD candidate will take advantage of the laboratories and tools of the research clusters based at University Iuav in Venice. The multidisciplinary task force includes urban designers, planners, economists, ecologists conducting international research on the interaction between the environment, the economy, and society in the climate crisis. The candidate will benefit from Iuav infrastructures. Iuav provides PhD programs in Urbanism, Planning and New technologies; the environment provides interactions in various disciplines, with the opportunity to attend seminars and courses. The group has intense research contacts with local and foreign institutions.