The USF is excited to announce the outcome of a new seed-funding award for research into pandemics and cities. The Pandemics and Cities research funding scheme ran during late 2021, and aimed to provide four awards of up to GBP 25,000 towards partnered urban research on Covid-19 and other infectious diseases. The scheme was very competitive, with over ninety applications received, and as a result the USF was pleased to approve an increased budget for the scheme. This permitted a total of seven projects to be funded, with teams, partner organisations, and research programmes based all around the world.
The seven successful projects are as follows (links below to expanded profiles on the USF website):
- The urban politics of wastewater-based epidemiology: transforming the relationship between waste, health, and urban governance (Drs Mohammed Rafi Arefin, Carolyn Prouse, and Josie Wittmer)
- Dispatches from the threshold: organizing for housing justice in a pandemic (Drs Rachael Baker and Eric Robsky Huntley)
- Navigating debt-trap urbanism in pandemic times: family homelessness and temporary accommodation in Greater Manchester (Professor Katherine Brickell and Dr Mel Nowicki)
- Towards resilient and liveable neighbourhoods post Covid-19: evaluating neighbourhood quality in Sydney (AUS) and Newcastle upon Tyne (UK) (Drs Ozgur Gocer, Ayse Ozbil Torun, and Seraphim Alvanides)
- The city after Covid-19: vulnerability and urban governance in Chicago, Toronto, and Johannesburg (Profs Roger Keil, Xuefei Ren, and Philip Harrison)
- Community-based social capital and economic resilience of SMEs in Iran: the role of socio-economic and built-environment characteristics of urban neighbourhoods (Drs Taimaz Larimian and Arash Sadeghi)
- From social infrastructure to pandemic resilience?: learning from and with low-income urban communities (Dr Melanie Lombard, Professor Fiona Anciano, and Dr Carlos Andres Tobar Tovar)