Former Urbanism master student Yaqi Wang, together with her mentors Rodrigo Cardoso and Claudiu Forgaci, has turned her graduation thesis into a research paper, now published in a special issue of Sustainability.
In this research, Yaqi, Rodrigo and Claudiu propose a new definition of ‘urban pandemic vulnerability’ to understand how pandemics affect cities and how cities can react. They identify a series of spatial, environmental and socio-demographic variables of interest to develop a vulnerability framework based on exposure, sensitivity and adaptive capacity features, which occur in different combinations in different parts of the city. This model is then applied to Amsterdam to create a map of pandemic vulnerability that differentiates between different types of vulnerability and accurately identifies the most problematic areas in line with real-world data.
Please read the open access paper here.