New approaches to measure neighborhood environmental quality and their application for policy and equity assessments in rapidly developing global cities

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Cities are affected by some of the highest levels of pollution and intense heat islands as they urbanize and industrialize, making them a powerful source of opportunity for technology and policy intervention. Populations in low- and middle-income countries (LMIC) and especially the urban poor often experience disproportionately high levels of exposure to pollution and urban heat. Yet evidence-driven technology and policy interventions in LMIC cities are limited by the lack of available data on intra-city spatial and temporal variation in environmental exposures. Without these data, cities cannot fully quantify the problem. Without quantifying the problem, they cannot effectively manage or solve it. Exciting advances in environmental sensing and digital image analysis have created innovative, reliable, and less-expensive opportunities for high-resolution environmental assessments. My proposed research program will leverage these new data collection and analysis tools to provide critical information on environmental exposures in four global cities which are diverse in geography and development and where my group has an active research presence, namely: Accra (Ghana), Beijing (China), Bogotá (Colombia), and Dhaka (Bangladesh). My program has three interlinking initiatives: (1) collect spatial-temporal field-based measurements of urban air temperature and relative humidity in the focus cities; (2) develop a series of convolutional neural network models that (i) extract and classify natural and built environments and transportation features from street view and remote sensing images, and (ii) predict high-resolution intra-city surfaces of air temperature and air pollution, and (3) identify features and phenotypes of urban technology or policy scenarios with better versus worse environmental exposure and equity outcomes. The quality of the urban environment has long-established ecological and health impacts, with the urban poor often being most affected. LMIC cities are starting to implement environmental policies to protect affected populations, but unfortunately these decisions are often made limited data to inform them. My interdisciplinary and global research program has the potential to fill this knowledge gap through novel measurements and methods that can provide critical information on the spatial-temporal dynamics of environmental quality in these four diverse cities, and that can be applied to policy and equity assessments in these cities.