PhD candidate in quantitative geography (urban scaling laws) M/F

The candidate who will be hired will work in the UMR IDEES Rouen laboratory on the Mont-Saint-Aignan campus and will then have a very suitable workplace for scientific interactions and publication of the works realized in the frame of this PhD contract.

This PhD project is at the crossroads of geography, economics, statistical physics and complexity sciences. It inquires the relations between location and housing price in urban areas using quantitative methods which compare large French, European and world urban areas in the last decades. It builds on recent works which uncovered the existence of scaling laws governing the spatial organisation of cities, regarding in particular their land use profile from the city center (very artificial land use) to the periphery (mostly natural land uses).
The purpose of the PhD project is to compare a range of indices concerning the radial profiles of large urban areas, in particular French ones (population density, artificial and natural land use shares, in particular), to housing prices in order to question then the empirical relevance of models coming from urban economics, which explain residential location choices as a compromise between daily mobility (linked to the distance the the city center) and housing price (smaller in the periphery, which makes larger housing lots more affordable).
The proposed PhD work will participate in this way to an interdisciplinary approach aiming to further our understanding or urban systems. Thanks to its link with other research projects of the supervising team members, it will also contribute to determining the influence of different types of natural areas and different surroundings (coastal cities, mountainous regions...) on housing prices, in particular in the periphery of the studied urban areas.