Dr. Megha Tyagi, a 2022 SMUS Post-Doctoral Fellow, has been awarded the prestigious Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions (MSCA) Postdoctoral Fellowship 2023 for her innovative project proposal titled “DigiPACK: Exploring Digital Participation with Children to Co-produce Knowledge for Active Neighbourhoods using SoftGIS methodology in Delhi, India.” She is among the 42% of women awardees this year, scoring 100% score in her proposal.
The Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions (MSCA) Fellowship
The MSCA Fellowship, administered by the European Research Executive Agency (REA), is the European Union’s premier funding program for doctoral and postdoctoral training. Established in 1996 (originally as Marie Curie Actions), the program fosters researcher career development by encouraging cross-border mobility and interdisciplinary collaboration. In the 2023 call, the REA received a substantial number of applications (8,039), with a competitive success rate of 15.8% (1,249 funded projects) and a total allocation of €221.40 million. Dr. Tyagi’s proposal, categorized under “environment and geoscience” (acceptance rate: 10.2%), exemplifies the program’s commitment to supporting groundbreaking research across diverse disciplines.
The DigiPACK Project
The DigiPACK project investigates the potential of SoftGIS, an internet-based Public Participation Geographic Information System (PPGIS), to facilitate meaningful participation of children in urban planning processes. The project focuses on active mobility and localized experiences in Delhi, India. It addresses the longstanding challenge of effectively engaging children in shaping their communities. SoftGIS offers a paradigm shift from solely evidence-based planning (data derived from scientific methods) towards a knowledge-informed approach that incorporates diverse and contextualized data gathered through participatory methods. Although SoftGIS has been successfully implemented in over 200 projects globally, its application remains limited within the Global North and often excludes children’s voices.
DigiPACK aims to bridge this gap by demonstrating the effectiveness of SoftGIS in mapping and analyzing children’s active mobility patterns and experiences in the Indian context. The project, hosted by the Department of Built Environment at Aalto University (Finland) under the supervision of Prof. Marketta Kyttä (a pioneer in internet-based SoftGIS), will commence in June 2025 and span two years. The anticipated outcomes include the development of a contextualized digital methodology and valuable insights into how age, gender, socio-economic background, and urban form influence children’s active mobility. These findings hold the potential to revolutionize participatory urban planning with children in India and the Global South.
Dr. Megha Tyagi is an urban mobility and social inclusion expert with more than eight years of experience in developing and managing inclusive, sustainable urban development and transport planning projects across Asia, Africa, UAE and Europe. She holds a bachelor’s (2013) and master’s (2016) degree in Architecture; and a PhD (2021) in transport planning from IIT Roorkee, India. Her PhD research was one of the earliest from India investigating the impact of neighbourhood built and social environment on children’s independent mobility to school and local destinations. Currently, her research and practice revolve around the intersection of climate change, transportation and gender inclusion. Since 2023, she has been working as a principal transport planner with Cities Forum, a global strategic advisory firm and think tank that aims at being catalyst, working with cities and governments to solve their sustainable urban development challenges. Since 2022, she also serves as a visiting lecturer at TU Berlin (Institute of Urban and Regional Planning, and the Chair of Integrated Transport planning).