Cum laude PhD for Isti Hidayati

On December 10th, Ms. Isti Hidayati defended her PhD thesis “Understanding mobility inequality. A socio-spatial approach to analyse transport and land use in Southeast Asian metropolitan cities” with cum laude. With her dissertation, Ms. Hidayati is contributing to sustainable urban development in Southeast Asia, focusing on the United Nations Sustainable Development goals, especially on goal 11 ‘Sustainable cities and communities’ and goal 5 ‘Gender equality’. Therefore, it contributes to the theoretical debate of mobility inequality at systemic and individual scale through a normative spatial analysis in combination with visual data and enriched with the analysis of individual qualitative data.

Her dissertation has a high academic and technical standard, through her novel approach on combining both perspectives of mobility inequality which is evident through her novel method combination and furthermore in primary data collection and analysis. She was able to collect primary data for informal settlements which are rarely collectible for researchers given the local context and the trust that must be earned from the local community; further her normative mathematical street network models with space syntax of the metropolitan region of Jakarta and Kuala Lumpur are the first of its kind as well the spatial models at a neighbourhood scale integrating novel data which cannot be retrieved from open source and must be collected in situ.

Supervision: Prof. Claudia Yamu, Dr. Wendy Tan and Prof. Ron Holzhacker

More information about and download dissertation