Alice Hertzog-Fraser
Doctorate at D‑ARCH
CHN K 76.2
Universitätstrasse 16
8092 Zürich
Switzerland
Research area
An urban anthropologist by training, Alice Hertzog joined the TDLab in late 2014. Her current doctoral thesis investigates patterns of migration and urban development along the Guinea Gulf, in particular in Benin. She studies how migrants shape the cities they move to and places they come from, with a focus on housing strategies and trans-local urban development.
This work is part of an ongoing collaboration with the Global Programme on Migration and Development at the Swiss Development Cooperation and is supervised by Prof. Dr Christian Schmid and Dr. Pius Krütli.
Curriculum Vitae
Alice grew up in England and France, after travelling extensively through South America and working in a self-built neighbourhood in Brazil, she returned to Europe where she gained an undergraduate degree in Social Anthropology at Cambridge University, and a masters from L’Ecole Urbaine at Sciences Po (Paris). She was also the recipient of a three year fellowship at the Ecole Normale Supérieure d’Ulm (Paris).
Previously Alice has collaborated with a wide range of actors, from cities to foundations, artists, museums, NGOs and think-tanks. She worked with the City of Paris on migrant entrepreneurship in the ethnic neighbourhood La Goutte d’Or, and with the Nantes metropolitan region on citizen participation.
In 2013 she moved to Zurich to join Urban-Think Tank, where she managed a collaboration on Emerging and Sustainable Cities with the Inter-American Development Bank and Swiss State Secretariat for Economic Affairs.
Additional information
Alice is a world social science fellow of the International Social Science Council, and a member of IMISCOE, a European network of scholars in the area of migration and integration. She has developed several teaching programmes at the ETH Zürich, including the summer school Markets in the Tropics and block course Grounded Materials.