Dr Sofia Pagliarin reflects on the evolution of her interdisciplinary research, what she values in supervising Master’s students and PhD researchers, and how she sees the academic landscape changing.
The complexity of urban issues
Urban questions rarely sit neatly within a single discipline and Sofia’s work reflects how naturally these fields intersect. The complexity of the issues she examines has consistently required an interdisciplinary approach, leading her to draw on a wide range of perspectives and tools for her research.
Building on her educational background in sociology, which included a master's degree in Environmental Sociology and Local and Area-Wide Development, her academic work has expanded into a range of interdisciplinary fields, including spatial planning and development, urban governance, science and technology studies (STS), infrastructure management, and complexity-informed approaches to the social sciences. In parallel, she has spent more than a decade engaging with complexity in social science methodology, with a particular focus on comparative and configurational approaches to social and urban research.
The core of her work lies on the description and explanation of the complex processes of change through which cities transform in post-industrial societies.
Joining IHS: connecting social science and urban practice
Sofia initially joined Erasmus University Rotterdam at the Department of Public Administration and Sociology (DPAS) by coordinating a research project on the processes of digitalisation and smart city development in Europe. She later moved to IHS where she contributed to a topic-shift in one of the specialisations of the IHS master programme, i.e., from the governance of “conventional” infrastructure development (e.g., bridges, megaprojects, landmarks) to the governance of digital infrastructure and smart cities. The master track trains students to critically analyse digital transformation in cities, linking consolidated conceptual frameworks on technological innovation and diffusion to concrete case studies.
Alongside teaching, she is involved in academic research and projects, such as:
- Digitalisation in European Cities
A multi-city comparative study examining how European municipalities adopt digital and “smart” technologies, and what these transformations look like in practice. The research draws on the conceptual frameworks she teaches and will contribute to forthcoming policy analysis. - Suburban Patterns Across Metropolitan Regions
A major book project expanding her earlier PhD work, analysing suburban patterns in European metropolitan regions through qualitative comparative analysis (QCA). - Large-Scale Urban Development Projects
A comparative analysis of major development projects in European cities, using a specialised time-based variant of qualitative comparative analysis (i.e., trajectory-based qualitative comparative analysis, TJ-QCA) to trace how projects unfold and transform. By cooperating with other colleagues, this approach enables researchers to examine urban change as a dynamic process by qualitatively identifying development stages describing the development of urban projects. These stages are then compared across all the selected urban projects, hence allowing to capture cross-case patterns of urban change.
As an IHS supervisor
At IHS, Sofia also supervises both Master’s students and PhD researchers, a role she approaches with both structure and care. In supervising students, Sofia first highlights the complexity of urban realities and then helps students identify appropriate tools to study them.
For PhD supervision, her approach centres on helping early-career researchers clarify their motivations and translate ideas into focused research questions, and develop proposals that are theoretically grounded, methodologically sound and empirically feasible. She also supports students in becoming confident, autonomous researchers while providing the conceptual, methodological and practical guidance needed to produce high-quality work.
Her international experience, spanning Italy, Belgium, Switzerland, Germany, and the Netherlands, has shaped a supervisory approach that is sensitive to the varied structures, expectations, and pressures doctoral researchers face, especially when doing comparative research work in different urban contexts.
Looking ahead
Sofia’s research remains engaged with recent developments in comparative methodology, particularly time-based extensions of Qualitative Comparative Analysis (QCA). She is also committed to strengthening methodological links between environmental studies and the social sciences by using QCA. In her work on digitalisation, she explores how technological solutions interact with human decision-making, administration and governance, as technology alone does not make a city “smart”.
She continues to contribute to the IHS master’s programme by teaching (together with other colleagues) complexity-informed approaches to studies cities and urban change, comparative methods in the social sciences specifically tailored for urban research, and urban digital transformations.
