Spatialising urban health vulnerability: An analysis of NYC’s critical infrastructure during COVID-19

Abstract

Chinese

This paper examines how fragmentation of critical infrastructure impacts the spread of the coronavirus outbreak in New York City at the neighbourhood level. The location of transportation hubs, grocery stores, pharmacies, hospitals and parks plays an important role in shaping spatial disparities in virus spread. Using supervised machine learning and spatial regression modelling we examine how the geography of COVID-19 case rates is influenced by the spatial arrangement of four critical sectors of the built environment during the public health emergency in New York City: health care facilities, mobility networks, food and nutrition and open space. Our models suggest that an analysis of urban health vulnerability is incomplete without the inclusion of critical infrastructure metrics in dense urban geographies. Our findings show that COVID-19 risk at the zip code level is influenced by (1) socio-demographic vulnerability, (2) epidemiological risk, and (3) availability and access to critical infrastructure.

Keywords

built environment health inequality infrastructure machine learning social justice spatial regression analysis

Get full access to this article

View all access options for this article.

References

Acuto

(2020) Engaging with global urban governance in the midst of a crisis. Dialogues in Human Geography 10(2): 221–224.

Addie

J-PD

Glass

Nelles

(2020) Regionalizing the infrastructure turn: A research agenda. Regional Studies Regional Science 7(1): 10–26.

Almagro

Orane-Hutchinson

(2020) The determinants of the differential exposure to COVID-19 in New York City and their evolution over time. SSRN. Available at: https://ssrn.com/abstract=3573619 (accessed 17 September 2020).

Anand

Gupta

Appel

(2018) The Promise of Infrastructure. Durham, NC, and London: Duke University Press.

Anselin

(1988) Spatial Econometrics: Methods and Models. Dordrecht, The Netherlands: Kluwer Academic Publishers.

Black

Johnson

VanHoose

(2015) The relationship between perceived racism/discrimination and health among black American women: A review of the literature from 2003 to 2013. Journal of Racial and Ethnic Health Disparities 2: 11–20.

Callon

(1998) Laws of the Markets. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell.

Centers for Disease Control and Prevention/Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry/Geospatial Research, Analysis, and Services Program (2020) CDC Social Vulnerability Index Database. New York, NY: Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Chen

Krieger

(2020) Revealing the unequal burden of COVID-19 by income, race/ethnicity, and household crowding: US county vs ZIP code analyses. Harvard Center for population and development studies Working Paper Series 19(1).

10.

Choi

Unwin

(2020) Racial impact on infections and deaths due to COVID-19 in New York City. Available at: https://arxiv.org/abs/2007.04743 (accessed 2 October 2020).

11.

Citizens Housing and Planning Council (2020) Density and COVID-19 in New York City. Report, May. New York: Citizens Housing and Planning Council.

12.

Connolly

Ali

Keil

(2020) On the relationships between COVID-19 and extended urbanization. Dialogues in Human Geography 10(2): 213–216.

13.

Correal

Jacobs

(2020) A tragedy is unfolding: Inside New York’s virus epicenter. The New York Times, 9 April.

14.

Davis

(2020) Covid-19 vulnerability mapping for the US’s 500 largest cities. In: Social progress imperative. Available at: https://socialprogress.blog/2020/04/03/covid-19-vulnerability-mapping-for-the-uss-500-largest-cities/ (accessed 16 October 2020).

15.

DeCaprio

Gartner

McCall

, et al. (2020) Building a COVID-19 vulnerability index. Journal of Medical Artificial Intelligence 3: 15–15.

16.

Edwards

(2003) Infrastructure and modernity: Force, time, and social organization in the history of sociotechnical systems. In: Misa

Brey

Feenberg

(eds) Modernity and Technology. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, pp. 185–225.

17.

Enright

Ward

(2021) Governing urban infrastructures under pandemic conditions: Some thoughts. Urban Geography. Epub ahead of print 1 March 2021. DOI: 10.1080/02723638.2021.1893050.

18.

ESRI (2020) How spatial autocorrelation (global Moran’s I) works. Available at: https://pro.arcgis.com/en/pro-app/tool-reference/spatial-statistics/h-how-spatial-autocorrelation-moran-s-i-spatial-st.htm (accessed 21 August 2020).

19.

Flanagan

Hallisey

Adams

, et al. (2018) Measuring community vulnerability to natural and anthropogenic hazards: The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s Social Vulnerability Index. Journal of Environmental Health 80(10): 34–36.

20.

Fotheringham

Rogerson

(2009) The Sage Handbook of Spatial Analysis. London: SAGE Publications.

21.

Gandy

(2006) The bacteriological city and its discontents. Historical Geography 34: 14–25.

22.

Glaeser

(2020) Urbanization and it’s discontents. National Bureau of Economic Research Working Paper 26839. Available at: http://www.nber.org/papers/w26839 (accessed 25 October 2020).

23.

Godoy

Wood

(2020) What do Coronavirus racial disparities look like state by state? Npr/Wnyc, 30 May.

24.

Goldenberg

(2018) 50 years after the Fair Housing Act, New York City still struggles with residential segregation. POLITICO, 23 April.

25.

Graham

(2010) Disrupted Cities: When Infrastructure Fails. London: Routledge.

26.

Gross

Zheng

Liu

, et al. (2020) Spatio-temporal propagation of COVID-19 pandemics. EPL (Europhysics Letters) 131: 1–7. DOI: 10.1209/0295-5075/131/58003.

27.

Hamidi

Sabouri

Ewing

(2020) Does density aggravate the COVID-19 pandemic? Journal of the American Planning Association 86(4): 495–509.

28.

Henriksen

Feighery

Schleicher

, et al. (2008) Is adolescent smoking related to the density and proximity of tobacco outlets and retail cigarette advertising near schools? Preventive Medicine 47(2): 210–214.

29.

Hernández-Morales

Oroschakoff

Barigazzi

(2020) The death of the city. POLITICO, 27 July.

30.

Johnson

(2007) The Ghost Map: The Story of London’s Most Terrifying Epidemic – and How It Changed Science, Cities, and the Modern World, reprint edn. New York, NY: Riverhead Books.

31.

Ladd

(1998) Evidence on discrimination in mortgage lending. Journal of Economic Perspectives 12(2): 41–62.

32.

Lamb

Kandula

Shaman

(2021) Differential COVID-19 case positivity in New York City neighborhoods: Socioeconomic factors and mobility. Influenza and Other Respiratory Viruses 15(2): 209–217.

33.

Lander

(2019) Desegregating NYC: A (very modest) one-year progress report. Report, April. NYC: New York City Council.

34.

Larkin

(2013) The politics and poetics of infrastructure. Annual Review of Anthropology 42: 327–343.

35.

Latour

(2007) Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network-Theory. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

36.

Levenson

(2020) Why New York is the epicenter of the American coronavirus outbreak. CNN, 26 March.

37.

McCoy

(2007) The Home Mortgage Disclosure Act: A synopsis and recent legislative history. Journal of Real Estate Research 29(4): 381–398.

38.

McFarlane

(2011) The city as assemblage: Dwelling and urban space. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 29(4): 649–671.

39.

Millett

Jones

Benkeser

, et al. (2020) Assessing differential impacts of COVID-19 on black communities. Annals of Epidemiology 47: 37–44.

40.

Mitchell

(2011) Carbon Democracy: Political Power in the Age of Oil. New York, NY: Verso.

41.

NYC Department of Health (2020) COVID-19 data: Cases, hospitalizations and deaths [data file and codebook]. Available at: https://github.com/nychealth/coronavirus-data (accessed 21 August 2020).

42.

Perry

Rothwell

Harshbarger

(2018) The devaluation of assets in black neighborhoods: The case of residential property. Report for Brookings, Metropolitan Policy Program. November. Washington, DC: Brookings.

43.

Powrie

(2020) Infrastructure and cities for a COVID-19 world. UKCRIC. Available at: https://www.ukcric.com/insights/infrastructure-and-cities-for-a-covid-19-world/ (accessed 15 June 2021).

44.

Raifman

(2020) Disparities in the population at risk of severe illness from COVID-19 by race/ethnicity and income. American Journal of Preventive Medicine 59(1): 137–139.

45.

Rothstein

(2017) The Color of Law: A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America. New York, NY: Liverlight.

46.

RS21 (2020) Urban health vulnerability index. Available at: https://covid.rs21.io/ (accessed 2 October 2020).

47.

Rutherford

(2020) Redeploying Urban Infrastructure: The Politics of Urban Socio-Technical Futures. Cham: Springer International Publishing.

48.

Schwirtz

Cook

(2020) These N.Y.C. Neighborhoods have the highest rates of virus deaths. The New York Times, 18 May.

49.

Sharifi

Khavarian-Garmsir

(2020) The COVID-19 pandemic: Impacts on cities and major lessons for urban planning, design, and management. The Science of the Total Environment 749: 142391.

50.

Squires

(1992) Redlining to Reinvestment. Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press.

51.

Steele

Legacy

(2017) Critical urban infrastructure. Urban Policy and Research 35(1): 1–6.

52.

Sugrue

(1996) The Origins of the Urban Crisis: Race and Inequality in Postwar Detroit. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

53.

Surgo Foundation (2020) The COVID-19 community vulnerability index map. Available at: https://precisionforcovid.org/ccvi (accessed 15 September 2020).

54.

Turner

Skidmore

(1999) Mortgage lending discrimination: A review of existing evidence. Report, June. Washigton, DC: Urban Institute.

55.

World Economic Forum (2020) Shaping the future of cities, infrastructure and urban services. World Economic Forum blog series Available at: https://www.weforum.org/events/world-economic-forum-annual-meeting-2020/sessions/shaping-the-future-of-cities-infrastructure-and-urban-services (accessed 2 June 2021).

56.

Zou

Hastie

(2005) Regularization and variable selection via the elastic net. Journal of the Royal Statistical Society: Series B (Statistical Methodology) 67(2): 301–320.