Ongoing Research Projects, Engagements and Collaborations

• United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (UN-SDG) Grant, awarded by the DVCR, University of Sydney, our project is on: Using remote sensing, satellite imagery and machine learning to track urban growth in India. The project is in partnership with the Indian Institute of Technology, Bombay's Centre for Urban Science and Engineering (CUSE). We hosted visiting academics and PhD students at the University of Sydney, with the visiting academics presenting a seminar on Big Urban Data and Remote Sensing Applications.
• AHURI Project on Measuring Neighbourhood Change through Residential Mobility and Employment . The project will draw on internal migration and journey-to-work data from the 2011 and 2016 Census to compute indices of neighbourhood change, identifying and focussing on deprived/affluent neighbourhoods based on residential mobility and employment connectivity. It will use this neighbourhood-change index to develop a neighbourhood-level measure of housing displacement/exclusion.

Completed Research Projects

• I presented in the Urban Models Seminar Series, being organised by TU Delft Urbanism, where a group of researchers came together to explore the history and influence of various urban, geographic, and economic models on the policy and practice of urban design and planning. The YouTube recording for my talk, which was a critique on Utilitarianism, and its implications for urban planning.
• AHURI Stand-Alone Project on New housing supply, population growth, and access to social infrastructure: This project developed a monitoring framework, to assist as a policy coordination tool, which correlates the development of new residential supply and potential population growth against the delivery, spatial density/distributions of, and accessibility to social infrastructure, based on case studies of greenfield development sites across Sydney, Brisbane and Perth. The Project Final Report is now published here. The related keynote and panel discussion is on YouTube: Uncharted Urban Futures: Australian cities post pandemic Conference 2021 Session 6: Social infrastructure delivery in a post-coronavirus context.
• Urban Studies Foundation Grant on Predicting Neighborhood Change using Big Data and Machine Learning: Implications for Theory, Methods, and Practice: Joint project with Prof. Karen Chapple at University of California, Berkeley: A January 2020 workshop was held at University of California, Berkeley, see details here. An August 2020 virtual workshop was hosted from Sydney, see details here.

Other links, media, and events

• Sydney Morning Herald report and news.com.au report on our work relating city sizes and economic inequality.
• 2016 Conversation article on city sizes, scaling, and inequalities.
• Cities as complex systems: Structure, scaling, and Economics, July 13-15, 2016, Hanover, Germany.
• 2018 Conversation article on relating city size distributions, population distribution, income, and costs of living
• 2018 Conversation article on the impact of Airbnb listings in Sydney and Melbourne on local rental markets
• 2019 Smart Cities and Suburbs, Australian government project on the use of social media and news mining as tools for enhancing public participation in planning for the City of of Canada Bay, NSW and Logan City Council, Brisbane.
• 2019 Government News article on Sydney 30-minute city vision in danger of being derailed covering implications of recent work on polycentricity published in Urban Studies
• 2019 Conversation artcile on how close is Sydney to the vision of creating three 30-minute cities covering implications of recent work on polycentricity published in Urban Studies
• 2019 ABC National Radio Life Matters Interview on How does your commute to work impact on your life?
• 2019 Sydney Morning Herald Interview and Interactive on Sydney's moment of truth: how will Sydney become home to an extra 1.3 million people by 2030?
• 2020 ABC National Radio Life Matters Interview on Our Bursting Cities: Housing Solutions
• 2020 Applied Urban Modelling (AUM) Conference, hosted by Cambridge University, Invited talk: AUM2020: Modelling the New Urban World Online Global Workshop
• 2021 Sydney University Media Release on New Housing Supply, Population Growth, and Accessibility to Social Infrastructure.
• 2021 AHURI Final Report Release on New housing supply, population growth and access to social infrastructure
• 2021 Government News Publication on Big data not being harnessed to improve infrastructure planning

(c) 2022 Somwrita Sarkar