CEGE0037: Group Coursework Project 2025

Background

Tomorrowville (see Figure 1) is a 5km2 virtual urban testbed that has been designed to represent typical physical and socio-economic aspects of evolving cities in the Global South. It is currently home to approximately 30,000 people, and is expected to double its population over the next 30-50 years. Tomorrowville is prone to multiple natural hazards, including flooding, debris flows, and earthquakes.

The main interacting physical and social systems of Tomorrowville are recorded in a GIS spatial geodatabase and accompanying spreadsheets that consist of four layers: (i) Land- use layer; (ii) Buildings layer; (iii) Household layer; and (vi) Individual layer. The land-use layer provides information on the types of uses of land across Tomorrowville. The buildings layer includes a list of attributes required to compute the impact of natural hazards on each building across Tomorrowville (e.g., building height, occupancy, age of construction). The household layer represents the social connections of individuals who are members of the same household (e.g., their general income level, community facilities  that members regularly attend), and can be used to capture their collective experience of a natural hazard event. The individual layer documents specific information on each person   (e.g., gender, age, workplace location), which can be used to determine their general reliance on the built environment.

The road network of Tomorrowville is stored in a further layer of the GIS, and a separate database provides important natural-hazard vulnerability information that can be directly mapped to the buildings layer.

Figure 1: The Tomorrowville virtual urban testbed: (left panel) land uses within Tomorrowville; (right panel) buildings of Tomorrowville.

Scope

Your team represents CEGE Risk and Resilience Consultants Ltd. who have won a bid from the Tomorrowville Environment Agency (EA) to conduct a risk and resilience assessment for Tomorrowville, in the face of a 100-year flooding event. The purpose of the assessment is to help the EA and the wider Tomorrowville government to determine what risk-mitigation and resilience-enhancing policies would be appropriate to implement as the  population of the urban area continues to grow.

The first goal of your assessment is to estimate the (i) total amount and (ii) general characteristics (age, gender, income etc) of the Tomorrowville population that may be displaced as a result of the flood. You should make reasonable assumptions on the measurable causes of displacement (e.g., the amount of damage that would result in intolerable downtime, etc.), and you can ignore disruption to the transportation network.

The second goal of your assessment is to determine Tomorrowville’s (a) workplace; (b) education; (c) healthcare; and (d) neighbourhood resilience to the flooding event. This resilience assessment should consider: (i) the downtime of relevant Tomorrowville facilities; and (ii) the general accessibility of these facilities for relevant individuals via the transportation network. You will need to propose an ad-hoc resilience metric to collectively capture these considerations, which should account for at least three temporal instances in the post-disaster recovery phase. You should make reasonable assumptions on the above considerations (e.g., damage-to-downtime/restoration mapping for various buildings), in addition to the following:

1.  Assume that ≥25cm of flood depth renders a road segment inaccessible;

2.  Assume that flood waters can only recede via permeation through the ground (i.e., evaporation of water is negligible);

3.  Assume that buildings require full repair before they are deemed occupiable.

Your findings from the above analysis should then be used to recommend targeted policies that the Tomorrowville government could implement to mitigate risk from, and enhance resilience to, future similar flooding events. At least one policy should be proposed for each goal.

You will need to make a formal presentation on your assessment to hypothetical

Tomorrowville EA representatives (i.e., Dr. Gemma Cremen, Mr. Kamal Achuthan, Mr. Roman Schotten, and Mr. Ali Atici).

You should use the tools available here to help you carry out some calculations required for the assessment. Outputs of these tools may be further processed using any suitable  software, e.g., Excel, Matlab or Python. You will also need to prepare a user guide to explain all of your calculations and assumptions (see Deliverables section below).

Core Materials

The following core materials - essential for the risk and resilience assessment to be carried out - have been uploaded to the coursework folder on Moodle:

1. TV_project.gdb, which includes the land-use and buildings layers of the

Tomorrowville GIS geospatial database, the raster file of the relevant flooding scenario, and the road network;

2. TV_Population_Data.xlsx, which represents a dataset capturing information about individuals, their households, and their socio-economic attributes.

3. Description_of_TV_Population_Data.pdf, which has accompanying metadata for the dataset of (2).

Supporting Materials

The following documents are included in the coursework folder on Moodle, and should be used for making reasonable assumptions as part of the assessment:

1.  A Simulation-Based Framework for Earthquake Risk-Informed and People- Centered Decision Making on Future Urban Planning

2.  A State-of-the-Art Decision Support Environment for Risk-Sensitive and Pro-Poor Urban Planning and Design in Tomorrow’s Cities

3. Implication of building inventory accuracy on physical and socio-economic resilience metrics for informed decision-making in natural hazards

You are also expected to conduct your own independent research to identify other sources of information relevant to your assessment that may be missing from the above documents.

Deliverables

Your team is expected to deliver the following during class time (11am to 1pm) on 24th March 2024:

1.  (70% of the total marks) An in-person presentation ten minutes in length (followed by two minutes of questioning by hypothetical EA representatives), covering (with   equal importance):

a.  the answers that address both goals of the assessment;

b.  your overall (high-level) approach to finding these answers;

c.  the policies you recommend on the basis of a;

d.  critical evaluation of your analysis, including limitations; and

e.  recommendations for further investigations that you believe should be

conducted by the EA to obtain more accuracy across various elements of your assessment.

The mark scheme for the presentation is as follows:

Your team is also expected to deliver the following, to be uploaded in a single zip file (titled as GroupNumber.zip) to the coursework submission folder on the Moodle page before the project deadline (17:00, 28th March 2025):

2.  A zip file containing all of the documentation (e.g., spreadsheets, scripts) related to your calculations. Please ensure that these are sufficiently detailed to support your work and include short (one sentence) explanatory comments for each calculation. Note that this will not be formally assessed, but may be used to deduct marks if

insufficient evidence is provided to support the content of the presentation

3.  (30% of the total marks) A written user guide for your work of no more than 1200 words and no more than 4 sides of A4 (including title references), covering:

a.  Methodology for determining the answers for both goals

b.  Any sources or references from which values, methods, metrics etc. were taken

c.  An explanation of any assumptions or estimations

Note: this is not a report, and does not need any introduction or conclusions etc.

4.  An attribution statement of max 1 side A4 stating the percentage of total work

conducted on each of the following elements by each team member (i.e. such that the contributions of all team members sum to 100% for each element):

a.  Developing the methodology for goal one

b.  Calculations for goal one

c.  Policy analysis for goal one

d.  Developing the methodology for goal two

e.  Calculations for goal two

f.   Policy analysis for goal two

g.  Critical evaluation of results, including recommendations

h.  Preparation & delivery of presentation

i.   Preparation of user guide

5.  A copy of your presentation slides

Note: you DO NOT need to include a general introduction to Tomorrowville in either your presentation or user guide, and instead should focus only on any analysis you have conducted within your team.

The mark scheme for the written deliverables is as follows: