Post-doctoral researcher position «Macro-economic scenarios and urban economic modeling»

Post-doctoral researcher position
« Macro-economic scenarios and urban economic modeling »
MUSCADE and ACCLIMAT Projects

Laboratories: CIRED and GEODE, Centre International de recherche sur l'Environnement et le Développement Géographie de l'environnement

Beginning: February, 1st, 2010

Duration: 24 months (2 successive contracts: 9 months in CIRED, Paris, then 15 months in GEODE, Toulouse)

Deadline for application:  January, 8 2010

Subject: Macro-economic scenarios and urban economic modeling

Position category: Post-doctoral researcher

Salary: Net monthly salary (in euro):1823€ to 2500€ according to experience

Context:
Recruitment occurs through two complementary projects, covering the cities of Paris and Toulouse, and dealing with issues raised by the emerging concept of sustainable cities, and especially adaptation of cities to climate change. These projects seek to provide researchers with an integrated modeling tool of cities, between physical sciences, engineering, economics and social sciences. They also aim at providing a tool for decision support that will allow urban planners to test urban scenarios and evaluate the consequences.

The MUSCADE project, funded by the French Agence Nationale de la Recherche (ANR), is applied to the urban area of Paris. The ACCLIMAT project, financed by STAE RTRA is applied to the urban area of Toulouse. Both propose to study the interactions between processes of urban development, urban micro-climate and climate change, using an interdisciplinary platform for numerical modeling. The scientific assessment, based on multicriteria indicators, will provide hints for adapting the city to climate change. For both projects, also, the socio-economic processes that govern urban growth will be modeled numerically using the socio-economic model NEDUM developed in CIRED. In the ACCLIMAT project the spatialization of urban development will then be developed through another model, LCM, complementary of NEDUM in terms of scale and representation.

Both projects are highly interdisciplinary: they involve economists, architects, building specialists, planners, geographers and climatologists.

The offered position covers the first two years of the projects and deals with studies on the socio-economic scenarios used overall for both projects, the development of urban economy model NEDUM and coupling of NEDUM and LCM models.

Job Description :
The first line of work is to establish general demographic and macroeconomic scenarios at the scale of France using a method of down scaling. The candidate will develop scenarios describing the evolution of the economic environment and the urban population. These scenarios will be based on the IPCC scenarios and will be developed from the model of economic prospective IMACLIM-R developed in CIRED (http://www.imaclim.centre-cired.fr/?lang=fr): it is a hybrid recursive general equilibrium model, combining macroeconomic analysis and realistic technological descriptions in the same architecture. The scenarios generated will be used to constrain numerical models of urban development and urban climate subsequently used to measure the impact on the city sprawl and climate change.

A second line of work will involve the development of the urban economics model NEDUM designed at CIRED. In its current form, the model represents a monocentric and axisymmetrical city, whose characteristics are constant at a given distance from the center. To give a more realistic description of a real city - the Greater Toulouse in the case of this project - it is necessary to account for spatial heterogeneity of economic activities.The study will consist in integrating into NEDUM more detailed modeling of local constraints and in validating the model using data available on the city of Toulouse.

Finally, it is intended to simulate the possible urban sprawl evolution modeled by NEDUM. The LCM model, which simulates the spatial changes of land at large scales, will be adapted to the simulation of urban expansion by the laboratory GEODE in parallel to the proposed work in this position. The third part of the job will be to interface NEDUM with an adapted LCM model. The coupling thus defined between the two models will explore ways to change the output ofNEDUM in the form of maps.

We draw the attention of candidates that the job will be based for the first 9 months in Paris at CIRED (http://www.centre-cired.fr/) where models on which the work will be based, IMACLIM-R and NEDUM, are developed. The position will then be based for the following 15 months in Toulouse, at the laboratory GEODE (http://w3.geode.univ-tlse2.fr/) which provides extensive data on the Toulouse area, an extensive expertise in handling geographic information and will be responsible for adapting the LCM model.

The candidate will work in a highly multidisciplinary team and in two laboratories with substantial expertise. The work will result in one or more publications.

Qualifications:
­         PhD
­         Experience in modeling and numerical analysis
­         Knowledge in Applied Economics
­         If possible experience in urban economics and a habit of manipulating geographical information
­         Ability to write scientific papers
­         Ability to teamwork

Send applications to: [email protected]