Geospatial analytics, satellite image processing and population and demographic mapping can be used to characterize neighborhoods within a city. Such methods can contribute to urban public health risk assessments and vulnerability mapping.

Recently, a non-profit working on monitoring disease outbreaks using wastewater testing approached us to optimize their wastewater collection locations and help interpret their data based on the geographic context of their sample collection points.

We used our 30m resolution CityPop data in combination with information on surface drainage networks, sewer and piped water networks for this. We also developed typologies of neighborhoods to help characterize the upstream areas that were draining into each wastewater collection location.