Institut fédéral de recherches sur la forêt, la neige et le paysage WSL
Fonction
Postdoc
Unité
Groupe
Systèmes d'utilisation du territoire
Eidg. Forschungsanstalt WSL
Zürcherstrasse 111
8903 Birmensdorf
Site
WSL Birmensdorf Bi HL E 40
Science and Technology Studies | Digital Spatial Planning | Urban and Environmental Governance
I am a postdoctoral researcher in the Land-Use Systems Group at the Swiss Federal Institute for Forest, Snow and Landscape Research WSL and incoming Associate Professor of Science - Technology - Society at the University of Maastricht. My work lies at the intersection of Science and Technology Studies (STS), urban studies, planning research, political ecologies and environmental humanities.
I study how digitalisation changes the ways in which cities, landscapes, and urban futures are known and governed. Rather than treating digital technologies as neutral instruments, my research examines how planning platforms, software systems, data infrastructures, models, and algorithms redistribute expertise, professional judgement, institutional responsibility, and possibilities for participation.
At WSL, I work on the SNSF-funded DISCLOSE project: The Digital Transformation of Spatial Planning. My research focuses particularly on the organisations and professional communities that promote and develop planning technologies, including software companies, consultants, public agencies, planners, and research institutions. I investigate how digital tools become embedded in planning practice, how particular representations of land and territory acquire authority, and how technological promises such as efficiency, integration, sustainability, and participation are translated into institutional arrangements.
A second strand of my work concerns environmental knowledge practices, citizen science, and multispecies urbanism. Here, I examine how citizens, scientists, public institutions, technologies, and nonhuman organisms participate in producing knowledge about urban environments. Across these research areas, I am interested in whose knowledge becomes actionable, which realities remain outside dominant systems of representation, and how more inclusive and responsible forms of urban and environmental governance might be developed.
Digital planning is not simply the introduction of new tools into an otherwise stable profession. It can transform what planners see, what can be compared or calculated, which actors are able to intervene, and where professional discretion and responsibility are located.
Within DISCLOSE, I investigate the sociotechnical infrastructures through which land-use planning is increasingly conducted. My research follows planning technologies across software development, consultancy, procurement, implementation, professional events, and everyday planning practice. Particular attention is given to the relationships among public planning authorities, technology providers, consultants, researchers, and other intermediaries.
The research addresses questions such as:
How do digital platforms and software systems reorganise planning knowledge and professional practice?
How are particular technologies presented and legitimised as solutions to planning problems?
How do classifications, interfaces, models, and data standards shape what can be represented and acted upon?
Where do judgement, accountability, and authority move when planning processes become digitally mediated?
How do planning cultures and institutional settings influence the adoption and use of digital technologies?
My earlier research examined the development of Smart City Vienna. Through ethnographic research, policy analysis, and interviews with planners, policymakers, technology developers, and citizens, I studied how smart-city imaginaries, participatory initiatives, and intelligent infrastructures reconfigured urban governance.
This work showed that urban technologies do not merely implement political objectives. They participate in defining urban problems, constructing publics, allocating responsibilities, and establishing particular versions of desirable urban futures. My publications have developed concepts including urban imaginaries as tacit governing devices, infrastructuring citizenry, and mundane AI oversight.
I study citizen science as an urban knowledge infrastructure through which residents, technologies, scientific institutions, and public authorities encounter one another. My research examines both the democratic possibilities of citizen-generated knowledge and the institutional frictions that arise when participatory data enter established systems of expertise and decision-making.
Research conducted in Siena investigated how citizen-science initiatives produce forms of urban belonging while also encountering difficulties in eliciting meaningful institutional responses. Related work examines how alternative knowledge practices can challenge, supplement, or become incorporated into dominant arrangements of urban governance.
My work on multispecies urbanism investigates cities as environments shared among humans, animals, plants, fungi, technologies, institutions, and ecological processes. I am particularly interested in how nonhuman life becomes represented within planning, legal, scientific, and civic practices.
This research brings STS into conversation with anthropology, political ecology, environmental humanities, and multispecies ethnography. It asks how ecological expertise is produced, how care becomes organised, and how planning and governance might become more responsive to forms of urban life that exceed exclusively human interests.
My research is grounded in qualitative and ethnographic inquiry. I combine:
multisited and event ethnography;
qualitative and expert interviews;
document, policy, and discourse analysis;
digital and infrastructural ethnography;
controversy and situational mapping;
participatory and co-creative research;
multimodal and multisensory methods;
experimental teaching and field-based inquiry.
Methodologically, I follow technologies and knowledge practices across the sites in which they are designed, promoted, procured, interpreted, contested, and used. This makes it possible to study digitalisation not as a singular transformation but as an uneven process assembled through institutional routines, professional cultures, technical standards, political imaginaries, and everyday acts of negotiation.
Swiss Federal Institute for Forest, Snow and Landscape Research WSL, 2025–present
Postdoctoral researcher and lead researcher for the project’s work on promoters and providers of planning technologies. The research examines how planners, software developers, consultants, public agencies, and research organisations participate in the digital transformation of spatial planning.
University of Siena, 2024–2025
Postdoctoral research on digital social innovation, citizen science, and urban governance. The project examined how digitally mediated initiatives reshape participation, institutional relations, and the production of urban knowledge.
Georg-Simmel Centre for Urban Studies, Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, 2024
Postdoctoral research on environmental knowledge practices, urban wildlife, and multispecies justice, supported through a Georg-Simmel Centre Seed Grant.
Institute for Advanced Studies Vienna, 2023–2024
Research on the sociotechnical dimensions of automated mobility and road safety in Vienna and Brno, including participatory workshops with citizens, planners, and policymakers.
University of Vienna, 2018–2024
Doctoral research examining smart-city policy, digital infrastructures, citizen participation, AI-supported mobility, and the politics of urban expertise.
I received my PhD in Science and Technology Studies from the University of Vienna. My dissertation, Urban (Dis)articulation in Assembling Smart City Vienna, examined how digital technologies, policy imaginaries, infrastructures, and participatory practices shaped the development of Smart City Vienna.
I also hold:
an MA in Science, Technology and Society from the University of Vienna;
an MA in Global Development and Humanitarian Practice from Oxford Brookes University;
a BA in Restoration and Conservation of Historical Buildings from the University of Tehran.
Before entering academia, I worked for several years in participatory urban development, informal-settlement upgrading, environmental governance, and international development. This professional experience continues to inform my interest in the relationship between conceptual research and situated planning practice.
My teaching brings STS into dialogue with urban studies, environmental humanities, anthropology, and artistic research. I use research-led, field-based, and experimental formats that allow students to examine how abstract concepts become materialised in technologies, infrastructures, bodies, environments, and everyday practices.
I have designed and taught courses at the University of Vienna, the University of Siena, and the University of Applied Arts Vienna, including:
Sensing the More-Than-Human: Methods in Multispecies Encounters
Multispecies Living and Dying in the Anthropocene
Multispecies Justice in Urban Ecosystems
Multimodal and Multisensory Ethnography of Smart Cities
Data in Society: A Qualitative Analysis of Big Data
The Perils and Promises of the Data Revolution
Doing Research in STS
Engaging with Diverse Forms of Publics in STS
Scientific Practices and Knowledge Management
Sepehr, P. and Sanna, V. S. (2026). From Data to Belonging: Citizen Science, Urban Friction, and Institutional Response in Siena. Urban Research & Practice.
https://doi.org/10.1080/17535069.2026.2685319
Sepehr, P. (2024). Mundane Urban Governance and AI Oversight: The Case of Vienna’s Intelligent Pedestrian Traffic Lights. Journal of Urban Technology, 32(3), 1–18.
https://doi.org/10.1080/10630732.2024.2302280
Felt, U. and Sepehr, P. (2024). Infrastructuring Citizenry in Smart City Vienna: Investigating Participatory Smartification between Policy and Practice. Journal of Responsible Innovation, 11(1).
https://doi.org/10.1080/23299460.2024.2313303
Sepehr, P. and Felt, U. (2023). Urban Imaginaries as Tacit Governing Devices: The Case of Smart City Vienna.Science, Technology, & Human Values, 50(2), 364–386.
https://doi.org/10.1177/01622439231178597
Sepehr, P. and Aarden, E. (2023). Between Straight Lines and Winding Alleys: Streets as Boundary Objects in the Transnational Modernisation of Urban Planning in Iran. In B. De Munck and J. Lachmund (eds.), Politics of Urban Knowledge: Towards an Epistemic History of the City. Routledge.
Sepehr, P. (2025). Should I Stay, or Should I Go? Questioning the “Smartness” of Intelligent Pedestrian Traffic Lights in Vienna. In M. Gugganig, K. Bronson and V. Mirza (eds.), The Smartification of Everything: Critical Analyses of a Ubiquitous Reality across Social Sciences and the Arts. University of Toronto Press.
I am a co-editor of the forthcoming special issue Alternative Knowledge Practices and the Politics of Urban Transformation in Environment and Planning C: Politics and Space.
From 2022 to 2025, I served as an elected Early Career Researcher representative on the Council of the Society for Social Studies of Science. I have also served on the selection committees for the 4S Mullins Prize, Fleck Prize, and Making and Doing Award.
I review research for journals in STS, urban studies, technology studies, and planning, including Science, Technology, & Human Values, Journal of Responsible Innovation, Journal of Urban Technology, Urban Studies, Cities, and Journal of Urban Affairs.
Digital transformation of spatial and land-use planning
Planning software, platforms, and data infrastructures
Science and Technology Studies
Urban expertise and professional knowledge
Digital urban governance and platform urbanism
Artificial intelligence and algorithmic governance
Citizen science and participatory knowledge infrastructures
Sociotechnical imaginaries and urban future-making
Multispecies urbanism and environmental justice
Ethnographic, multimodal, and experimental methods
ORCID: 0000-0002-4209-0759
WSL publications