2023 Early Stage Urban Research Awards
The Boston University Initiative on Cities (IOC) is pleased to announce the 2023 recipients of our ninth annual request for proposals for early stage urban research. These seed grants support early stage academic research endeavors focused on urban challenges and urban populations, both domestic and global. This year’s seed grant cycle is the first to operate under our new Urban H-index model, with particular interests in health, heat, and housing research, and to provide much more funding for each project than in previous cycles. Out of a large pool of applications, the selection committee of professors from across different disciplines on campus and IOC staff selected 2 projects to fund for this cycle!
Hyperresolution large-eddy simulations for assessing the local impacts of heat mitigation strategies
PI: Dan Li, Associate Professor, Department of Earth & Environmental Health, College of Arts & Sciences
Co-PI: Patricia Fabian, Associate Professor, Department of Environmental Health, School of Public Health
Project Description: Cities are emerging as the nexus of the energy, water, health, and climate challenges in the 21st century. More than 50% of the world’s population lives in cities, and the urban population continues growing. Urban areas are major sources of greenhouse gas emissions. Urbanization also modifies the Earth’s surface properties, resulting in the well-known “urban heat island” phenomenon and other changes in weather and climate. The urban heat islands can greatly exacerbate the negative impacts of heat waves, which are excessively hot weather lasting for several days or even longer. Heat waves are projected to become more frequent, intense, and longer lasting under a warming climate. Heat is the top cause of weather-related deaths in the US and globally.
This project focuses on informing the design and assessing the effectiveness of urban heat mitigation strategies at local (neighborhood) scales using first principle-based numerical approaches. We focus on the local (neighborhood) scale because advancing climate equity and environmental justice requires knowledge of the local impacts of climate change and mitigation/adaptation strategies. However, there is a strong scale separation between the traditional weather/climate modeling and the tools needed to assess the local impacts of heat mitigation strategies.
The proposed research aims to fill this gap by utilizing hyper-resolution (1-5 m) large-eddy simulations, a new modeling paradigm that differs from traditional weather/climate modeling. We will use Chelsea, an environmental justice community in Massachusetts, as our testbed. To the best of our knowledge, this will be one of the first studies on heat mitigation over a real urban canopy and under realistic weather conditions using meter-scale, building-resolving large-eddy simulations.
Understanding Long-Term Mobility in Nairobi’s Slums
PI: Benjamin Marx, Assistant Professor, Department of Economics, College of Arts & Sciences
Project Description: This project will kickstart tracking and re-surveying a large sample of Nairobi slum residents surveyed more than a decade ago in 2012. Back then, I jointly led a research team that conducted a complete mapping exercise of Nairobi’s largest informal settlement, Kibera. We collected coarse data on housing conditions from more than 32,000 resident households, detailed demographic and socioeconomic data from a random sample of 1,123 households, and high-resolution satellite imagery, allowing us to evaluate housing quality across the settlement. This earlier work led to two widely cited publications in which we identified the lack of longitudinal research on slum residents as a key research gap in this literature.
Until now, this data gap has made it very difficult to understand the mobility patterns of slum dwellers in developing regions generally and to answer key questions in the academic literature on slums. In particular, there is a dearth of evidence on migration in and out of slum areas. We lack a good understanding of whether households face constraints in moving out of informal settlements and the nature of these constraints: housing supply shortages, credit and liquidity constraints, lack of access to insurance, labor market discrimination, etc. What is especially missing in this literature are attempts to track slum dwellers over time and to understand how often these households attempt to and succeed in relocating to different, formal neighborhoods. Our earlier fieldwork found that the median household had resided in the Kibera slum for ten years. This figure suggested that many households may not transition out of slum living conditions as rapidly as previously thought. As a potential explanation for this finding, we hypothesized that slum livelihoods (which combine unemployment, poor health outcomes, and a lack of access to amenities, credit, and insurance) might create living conditions akin to a poverty trap for some of their residents. This hypothesis has important policy implications for urban planning but has remained largely untested, with a few exceptions.
The project will evaluate the feasibility of tracking the microsample of 1,123 households surveyed in 2012 to understand: 1) how many of these households still reside in the Kibera slum; 2) what explains the location choice of these “stayers”; 3) how many have (forcingly or willingly) moved out of the slum; and 4) what has been the location of destination of these movers.
This project will provide entirely novel evidence on the mobility of slum residents, which is itself key to understanding how slum dwellers can be better integrated into the growing cities of the developing world. Do slums help absorb the inflows of rural migrants and facilitate their transition toward formal housing and employment in the city? Or do slum living conditions create structural barriers preventing rural migrants from successfully transitioning?