DEPRIMAP participated in the 2025 Nordic Workshop on AI for Climate Change, held in Gothenburg, Sweden. Stefanos Georganos presented on the role of AI and geospatial methods in addressing urban inequality under climate stress, showcasing work on thermal discomfort mapping, population estimation, and infrastructure access in Sub-Saharan African cities. The workshop fostered valuable dialogue across disciplines and opened new doors for Nordic collaborations on AI for urban resilience.
At JURSE 2025 in Tunisia, the DEPRIMAP team presented new research on scalable urban deprivation mapping using open geospatial datasets. The study, rooted in collaboration from the 2024 Switzerland workshop, showcased a composite deprivation score framework tested in Nairobi and validated across eight global cities. The presentation introduced extended cross-city comparisons and laid out future directions, including new indicators, refined thresholds, and open-source tools.
The DEPRIMAP team is set to present at two major international conferences in May and June 2025. At JURSE 2025 in Tunisia, Stefanos Georganos will showcase a paper born out of the collaborative Switzerland workshop, focusing on scalable open-data methods for mapping urban deprivation. In June, Sai Ganesh Veeravalli, Stefanos Georganos, and Jan Haas will represent DEPRIMAP at the EARSeL Global South workshop, presenting new insights into informal settlement transformation using Google’s 2.5D dataset and Street View validation. Read more about our upcoming contributions and what they mean for mapping urban change.
This workshop recap brings together insights from leading voices in urban poverty and population mapping. From community-driven slum data to AI-based vulnerability models and the looming crisis of census funding, the sessions explored how we can build inclusive, scalable, and resilient urban data ecosystems. With examples from Nairobi to Mumbai and beyond, this post highlights both the innovations and institutional challenges shaping the future of global urban monitoring.
The workshop at the University of St. Gallen brought together experts and stakeholders from around the world to discuss innovative approaches for mapping informal settlements and addressing urban vulnerabilities. DEPRIMAP was introduced as a new initiative aligned with these efforts, focusing on scalable frameworks to support SDG 11.1.1 and improve data-driven urban planning.
We are excited to welcome Sai Ganesh Veeravalli as a doctoral student in the DEPRIMAP project at Karlstad University, starting August 2024. Sai Ganesh brings expertise in geo-information science, urban resilience, and disaster risk reduction, making him a valuable addition to our interdisciplinary team.
DEPRIMAP is a research funded by FORMAS (Swedish Research Council, application 2023-01210) involving KAU (Karlstad University, Sweden)
