Quantifying Cities for Sustainable Development: Transforming urban data collection to support research and policy making in developing countries

我们的项目解决了社会研究方法方面的一个重大差距，该方法对消除低收入和中等收入国家的城市贫困和促进可持续发展具有重要影响。简而言之，我们正在创建一种低成本的工具，用于在经历快速空间人口和社会经济变化的城市中收集关于城市人口动态的关键信息。这些信息对于城市规划和发展倡议以及救灾工作的成功至关重要。通过改善参与这类活动的行为者的信息基础，我们的目标是改善发展中世界的城市居民的生活，特别是最贫穷和最脆弱的人的生活。该项目的主要成果将是免费提供的“城市抽样工具包”，其中提供了详细的说明和开放源码软件工具，以便在各种空间尺度上复制这种方法。我们的研究是因为越来越多的人认识到，城市是全球努力解决贫困和向环境更可持续的经济增长过渡的关键行动场所。从现在到2050年，全球城市人口预计将增长20亿以上，其中绝大多数增长发生在非洲和亚洲的低收入和中等收入国家。制定以证据为基础的政策来管理这种增长是一项紧迫的任务。正如联合国秘书长潘基文所说：“城市日益成为人类的家园。它们是气候行动、全球繁荣、和平与人权的核心……要改变我们的世界，我们必须改变城市。”不幸的是，在世界上发展最快的许多城市，甚至连城市人口的基本数据都缺乏。现有的收集重要信息的方法，包括人口普查和抽样调查，在经历快速变化的城市地区具有严重的局限性。在城市规划和政策制定方面，大数据方法并不能充分取代代表性的人口数据。我们将通过结合概念创新和创造性地整合新的工具和技术来克服这些限制，这些新工具和技术是为抽样、调查和估计难以计数的人口特征而开发的。反过来，这将帮助我们捕捉到传统方法所遗漏的城市中大量(有时是唯一容易受到伤害的)“隐藏人口”。通过使用免费可用的卫星图像，我们可以对一个快速变化的城市的当前形态有一个了解，并创建一个“采样框架”，然后我们就可以从这个框架中为我们的调查确定受访者。重要的是，与以前的方法不同，我们不会简单地将城市官方居民计算在内。我们有兴趣了解实际存在的人口的特征，包括最近的移民、临时居民以及居住在非正式或非法住区的人，这些人在官方统计工作中往往不被视为正式居民。换言之，我们进行调查的“纳入准则”是在香港居住而不是居住。通过采用这种方法，我们希望能更准确地捕捉到城市人口的情况。我们还将限制调查问卷的长度，以最大化回答，然后使用新的统计技术重建反映广泛人口统计和社会经济信息的丰富统计肖像。我们将在巴基斯坦的一个城市试验我们的方法，该城市最近完成了一项全国人口普查工作，这项工作对城市人口统计的准确性产生了一些争议。据我们所知，这将是在发展中国家试行和验证新的城市抽样和调查方法的第一个项目。

Our project addresses a critical gap in social research methodology that has important implications for combating urban poverty and promoting sustainable development in low and middle-income countries. Simply put, we're creating a low-cost tool for gathering critical information about urban population dynamics in cities experiencing rapid spatial-demographic and socioeconomic change. Such information is vital to the success of urban planning and development initiatives, as well as disaster relief efforts. By improving the information base of the actors involved in such activities we aim to improve the lives of urban dwellers across the developing world, particularly the poorest and most vulnerable. The key output for the project will be a freely available 'City Sampling Toolkit' that provides detailed instructions and opensource software tools for replicating the approach at various spatial scales. Our research is motivated by the growing recognition that cities are critical arenas for action in global efforts to tackle poverty and transition towards more environmentally sustainable economic growth. Between now and 2050 the global urban population is projected to grow by over 2 billion, with the overwhelming majority of this growth taking place in low and middle-income countries in Africa and Asia. Developing evidence-based policies for managing this growth is an urgent task. As UN Secretary General Ban Ki Moon has observed: "Cities are increasingly the home of humanity. They are central to climate action, global prosperity, peace and human rights...To transform our world, we must transform its cities." Unfortunately, even basic data about urban populations are lacking in many of the fastest growing cities of the world. Existing methods for gathering vital information, including censuses and sample surveys, have critical limitations in urban areas experiencing rapid change. And 'big data' approaches are not an adequate substitute for representative population data when it comes to urban planning and policymaking. We will overcome these limitations through a combination of conceptual innovation and creative integration of novel tools and techniques that have been developed for sampling, surveying and estimating the characteristics of populations that are difficult to enumerate. This, in turn, will help us capture the large (and sometimes uniquely vulnerable) 'hidden populations' in cities missed by traditional approaches.By using freely available satellite imagery, we can get an idea of the current shape of a rapidly changing city and create a 'sampling frame' from which we then identify respondents for our survey. Importantly, and in contrast with previous approaches, we aren't simply going to count official city residents. We are interested in understanding the characteristics of the actually present population, including recent migrants, temporary residents, and those living in informal or illegal settlements, who are often not considered formal residents in official enumeration exercises. In other words, our 'inclusion criterion' for the survey exercise is presence not residence. By adopting this approach, we hope to capture a more accurate picture of city populations. We will also limit the length of our survey questionnaire to maximise responses and then use novel statistical techniques to reconstruct a rich statistical portrait that reflects a wide range of demographic and socioeconomic information. We will pilot our methodology in a city in Pakistan, which recently completed a national census exercise that has generated some controversy with regard to the accuracy of urban population counts. To our knowledge this would be the first project ever to pilot and validate a new sampling and survey methodology at the city scale in a developing country.