Editorial: Urban analytical approaches to combating the Covid-19 pandemic

While there has been a lot written about COVID-19 Angela  Yao, Bin Jiang, Jukka Krisp, Xintao Liu, and Haosheng Huang and myself have just recently wrapped up a special issue in Environment and Planning B and how it can be studied through the lens of urban analytics.  After a call for papers for the special issue, we published 10 papers that cover a wide spectrum of analytical methods have been used to study the pandemic. These ranged from how policies impacted pedestrian patterns to how data could on the disease could be visualized along with many things in between. Below you can see papers:

• Angel, A., A. Cohen, S. Dalyot and P. Plaut.
• Impact of COVID-19 policies on pedestrian traffic and walking patterns. 
• Dass, S., D. T. O'Brien, A. Ristea. (2023):
• Strategies and inequities in balancing recreation and COVID exposure when visiting green spaces.
• Li, R. and Huang, Y. (2023):
• COVID-19 Pandemic and minority health disparities in New York city: A spatial and temporal perspective. 
• Li,Y., Z. Ran, L. Tsai, and S. Williams. (2023):
• Using CDR (Call Detail Records) to determine mobility patterns of different socio-demographic groups in the western area of Sierra Leone during early COVID-19 crisis.
• Praharaj, S., Solis, P., and Wentz, E. A. (2023):
• Deploying geospatial visualization dashboards to combat the socioeconomic impacts of COVID-19.
• Tong C, Shi W, Zhang A, et al. (2023):
• Predicting onset risk of COVID-19 symptom to support healthy travel route planning in the new normal of long-term coexistence with SARS-CoV-2.
  
• Venerandi, A., Aiello, L.M., and Porta, S. (2023): 
• Urban form and COVID-19 cases and deaths in Greater London: an urban morphometric approach. 
• Wolday, F. Bocker, L. (2023):
• Exploring changes in residential preference during COVID-19.
• Yu, Z. and Liu, X. (2023):
• Spatial variations of the third and fourth Covid-19 waves in Hong Kong: a comparative study using built environment and socio-demographic characteristics. 
• Zhang, W., Barchers, C. and Smith-Colin, J. (2023): 
• Transit communication via Twitter during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Accompanying these papers is an editorial entitled "An overview of urban analytical approaches to combating the Covid-19 pandemic," In this editorial we situate these papers in the larger literature of urban analytics and Covid-19. Also in the editorial, we explore what can be learned from the current research on Covid-19 and finally we identify gaps and future research opportunities for urban analytics in combating epidemic outbreaks.

A framework of the Covid-19 pandemic dynamics in urban systems.

Covid-19 research themes and topics through the lens of geography and urban analytics.

Full Reference:

Yao, X.A, Crooks, A.T., Jiang, B., Krisp, J., Liu, X. and Huang, H. (2023), An overview of urban analytical approaches to combating the Covid-19 pandemic, Environment and Planning B, 50 (5), pp. 1133–1143. (pdf)