Under the call “Retreating to grow: the impact of pandemics in a world without visible borders” (PANDÈMIES 2020) of the Agency for the Management of University and Research Grants (AGAUR), grants have been awarded to research projects that aim to analyse the impact of COVID-19 in particular and the concept of pandemic in general. The projects will be developed over a maximum of 18 months. They propose new measures, models and lines of action to help to overcome the consequences of pandemics and to define new prevention, analysis and treatment models.

Five out of 32 projects are led by or involve researchers from the Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya · BarcelonaTech (UPC): “DIVINE”, “Barcelona Ciutat Fràgil”, “Drones against COVID-19”, “ComMit-20” and “Municipis resilients a les pandèmies mitjançant el nexe de l'agricultura de proximitat, energia, aigua i residus. Del pilot al municipi”.

Improving care for COVID-19 patients based on risk factors
The DIVINE project, which stands for “DynamIc eValuation of COVID-19 cliNical statEs and their prognostic factors to improve the intra-hospital patient management”, aims to identify the risk factors that affect the prognosis and state transitions (admission, ICU, discharge, death) of COVID-19 patients. Knowing these factors will enable physicians to anticipate the potential risks for patients after admission and will serve a dual purpose: providing better patient care according to their initial risk and improving hospital management, especially in periods of high healthcare demand.

To achieve these goals, the project will use patient data collected from several hospitals in the southern Metropolitan Area of Barcelona over several waves of the pandemic. Additionally, the research team also aims to estimate the disease’s incubation period (the time between exposure and the onset of symptoms), which would be very useful to create simulation models to explore the evolution of the pandemic on a global scale.

The project is led by Guadalupe Gómez and involves several members of the Biostatistics and Bioinformatics Research Group (GRBIO): UPC researchers Erik Cobo, Klaus Langohr, Daniel Fernández, Núria Pérez, Jordi Cortés and Leire Garmendia, and researcher Mireia Besalú, from the University of Barcelona (UB). The project is co-organised with a group of researchers from the Bellvitge Biomedical Research Institute (IDIBELL), led by Cristian Tebé. It also involves the following hospitals: Bellvitge, Moisès Broggi (Sant Joan Despí), General de l'Hospitalet, Viladecans, Sant Boi de Llobregat, Residència Sant Camil (Sant Pere de Ribes), Sant Antoni Abat (Vilanova i la Geltrú) and Comarcal de l'Alt Penedès.

The fragile city
The Barcelona Ciutat Fràgil project explores the conditions of vulnerability and resilience during the first state of alarm caused by the pandemic. It aims to map the fragile city, to draw an alternative map of the pandemic’s impact in Barcelona that can be superimposed on the city’s conventional map to compare both images. The researchers want to make a hidden spatiality visible. Therefore, they propose to create a map that shows events and practices associated with the marginality and fragility of life linked to space.

The project will also showcase creative and poetic practices, ephemeral events that, according to the researchers, have become resilience exercises with the power to create meaning and transform the urban setting. It analyses three areas: spaces for death and mourning, loneliness and fear; spaces for sociability and spontaneous creativity; and spaces for bonding and imaginary spaces with the landscape and natural settings.

Each area will be explored and represented in different types of spaces, for example: the experience of abandonment and the impossibility of mourning; spaces for death; the study of habitability and domestic spaces; neighbourhood support and assistance networks; the adaptation of museums; the spaces in memory of those who have suffered during the pandemic; public space as a refuge for the migrant population; spaces for demonstration and spontaneous routes; the memory or forgetfulness about past pandemics; peripheral spaces and urban structure, etc. The result will be a dynamic website that will show the cartography of this fragile city, an exhibition and a book.

Assistant professor Marta Serra is the principal investigator of the project, which is a proposal of the Architecture, Cities and Culture (ACC) research group and will involve an interdisciplinary team made up of researchers from other research groups and external experts. The ACC group, coordinated by professor Marta Llorente and linked to the UPC’s Department of Theory and History of Architecture and Communication Techniques, has been working for more than ten years on the conceptualisation and abstraction of urban fragility, identifying possible forms of spatial representation and occupation.

Drones to monitor crowds
The project “Drones against COVID-19. Propagation by Controlling Capacity in Public Spaces” is based on the idea that controlling capacity at crowded events is one of the key elements to fight COVID-19. At indoor events access control is enough, but at outdoor public events with too many accesses capacity can only be controlled from the air. Using drones turns out to be an appropriate measure due to its reduced cost and the possibility of low flying. The project is coordinated by researcher Cristina Barrado, from the ICARUS research group, and involves the Castelldefels City Council.

The project will focus on finding the right drone model for this task and on improving existing neural network models by training them to recognise people from the sky. In addition to recognising and counting people, the project aims to test a new model that is also capable of detecting groups of people from the images provided by the drone of Castelldefels’ local police, which collaborates in the project. The research team will work on optimising an AI-based algorithm that can be run on a mobile device (tablet or phone) connected to the drone in real time while ensuring data protection and individual privacy. Consequently, the faces on the images will automatically be blurred to anonymise the attendees.

Buildings in pandemic emergency mode
“Designing Resilient Communities to Mitigate Pandemic and Climate Change Effects” (ComMit-20) is the proposal led by the Catalonia Institute for Energy Research (IREC), a research entity linked to the UPC. The project aims to determine the short- and long-term impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic on building energy consumption, and the changes in consumption patterns and in environmental quality requirements. The project will propose measures, policies and recommendations to increase the resilience of buildings and urban communities. It will also integrate these new requirements into energy design and planning tools and energy management systems, with special emphasis on residential and educational buildings.

The idea behind the project is that, in the context of the COVID-19 health emergency, we must not forget about the climate emergency. Thus, flexible design and management solutions are needed for buildings to operate, depending on the context, by prioritising high environmental quality requirements or minimising energy consumption and expenditure. The research team will also analyse how changes in the use of buildings and new ventilation requirements affect energy management optimisation models, and how effective the AI methods implemented are to respond to situations like the current one or whether they need to be rethought. The idea is for buildings to operate in ‘pandemic emergency mode’ without compromising the ‘energy efficiency mode’, keeping energy consumption at the lowest.

Jaume Salom, head of the IREC’s Thermal Energy and Building Performance group, is the coordinator of the ComMit-20 project, which also involves several IREC research groups on thermal energy and building performance, power systems and energy system analysis. The project also involves UPC Serra Húnter professor and IREC researcher Cristina Corchero, from the Department of Statistics and Operations Research; researchers Miquel Casals and Marcel Macarulla, from the Construction Research and Innovation Group (GRIC); and Serra Húnter professor Lluc Canals, from the Project Design, Sustainability and Communication Research Group (GIIP). Casals, Macarulla and Canals are all linked to the Department of Project and Construction Engineering.

More resilient, sustainable and healthy cities
Researchers Santiago Gassó and Eva Cuerva, who are linked to the GRIC and the UPC’s Department of Project and Construction Engineering, and researcher María Dolores Álvarez del Castillo, from the UPC’s Department of Chemical Engineering, participate in the project “Municipis resilients a les pandèmies mitjançant el nexe de l'agricultura de proximitat, energia, aigua i residus. Del pilot al municipi” (Cities resilient to pandemics through the nexus of local agriculture, energy, water and waste. From pilot to city). The project is coordinated by professor Xavier Gabarrell, head of the Sustainability and Environmental Prevention (SosteniPrA) research group at the Environmental Science and Technology Institute (ICTA) of the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona (UAB).

The premise behind the project is that the COVID-19 pandemic has proved that cities were not ready to face such a catastrophe: they concentrate services and jobs, they encourage social interaction... but they are also responsible for 70% of global waste and consume 80% of all food produced globally. This has highlighted cities’ low resilience, which became clear with the fear of possible problems in food distribution during lockdown.

Therefore, the project aims to transform cities into resilient, sustainable and healthier spaces to face current and future pandemics through local agriculture and recycling and waste reduction. It will study waste metabolism, given that the state of alarm has had a clear impact on household consumption habits; promote home and community composting in buildings and schools; and encourage local agriculture, especially rooftop farming. The project will analyse the processes associated with the three previous approaches from an environmental perspective, through the characterisation of the emission factors for certain compounds (N2O, volatile organic compounds and methane) and the analysis of product life cycles, and it will scale up recycling and rooftop farming systems for municipalities.

A case study will also be conducted focusing on the city of Cerdanyola (Barcelona) to identify and analyse consumption and food waste patterns, and changes in waste generation due to increased use of disposable packaging to follow the hygiene measures recommended to prevent infection. It will also assess the social acceptance of using rooftops to implement local agriculture and self-management of the organic fraction. The emission factors will be determined during pilot testing at the UAB’s experimental facilities and two schools in the Vallès region that will participate in the project. The results will make it possible to propose new circularity strategies and closed systems of local agriculture.

Further information

• Funding for research projects under the call “Retreating to grow: the impact of pandemics in a world without visible borders” (PANDÈMIES 2020)