When: Tuesday 1 March 2022, 12.30-13.30
Where: Online, via Zoom
Prior registration needed here.
Please join us for the next SPS Seminar on Tuesday 1 March 12.30-13.30 CET (online). This time we welcome Lukas Höller (SPS Urbanism, TU Delft), Dirk Schubert (HafenCity University Hamburg), and Christoph Lofi & Lixia Chu (EWI Computer Science, TU Delft), who will present the Time Travel project, a Digital Humanities cooperation between TU Delft and HCU Hamburg funded by the Volkswagen Foundation.
The COVID-19 pandemic shows how the spread, intensity and control of a disease vary in relation to unevenly distributed socio-cultural, economic and environmental resources, qualities and threats in cities – i.e. access to health facilities, population density, or exposure to pollution. To provide new planning strategies for healthier urban environments, the Time Travel project will move beyond the focus on individual health risk factors and collect, display and cross-check non-predetermined spatial, socio-cultural and disease-related datasets in space and over time. Urban Planning, Architecture and Planning History and Computer Science are the disciplines involved in the project, which embraces the idea of Digital Humanities as interdisciplinary activity shared by computer and social science scholars.
Using a supervised machine learning methodology, hundreds of multi-source, fine-scaled and historical datasets are crossed to reveal unexpected relations between spatial forms, social determinants and COVID-19 spread and incidence over time, thus complementing the results from traditional methods. Drawing conclusions from overlapping datasets at multiple scales and times within a transferable framework can provide planners, decision-makers and the civil society with evidence-based planning strategies to promote adaptive and liveable urban environments.
