Hello all,
I am in a progress of developing my PhD research proposal central to applying GIS and remote sensing to assessing social vulnerability to natural hazards in urban environments. I am taking the proposition that the built environment in urban areas is the physical representation of social structures, and hence variations in the built areas should be predictive of variations in the social structures. This provides a context to understand variations in social vulnerability to natural hazards in a measurable way that can allow us to better quantify risk levels. Having accepted this idea, I am proposing a methodology on how remote imagery can be used to capture variables in urban environments, that become in essence factors distinguish urban areas from one to another and can be correlated to socioeconomic data and other variable from population and housing census and modeled with other hazard information into a spatial decision support system to conduct vulnerability assessment.
Taking a full advantage from the "magic" internet, I thought it might be a good idea to send a general a brief of the problem statement and my research questions (in the attached file) to this list, hoping to get a feedback from you. I understand how busy most of you are, and therefore I tried to make it as brief as possible by taking off all the literature review section. I will be happy to hear your useful comments, suggesting any methods, techniques, references, and whatever you think it might be useful to strengthen the research.
Thanks for all in advance.
regards,
Tarek
*****************************************************
Tarek Rashed
PhD Graduate Student & Teaching Assistant
Department of Geography
San Diego State University
San Diego, CA 92182-4493 USA
Phone: 619-265-8541; FAX: 619-594-4938;
e-mail: [log in to unmask]
*****************************************************
|