hadi e arbabi

f132
broad lane blk
sir frederick mappin bldg
mappin street, sheffield

hadi is a lecturer in the resources, infrastructure systems, & built-environments (rise) group at the university of sheffield. their work and research interests sit at the interface of data-driven urban analytics and planning. hadi’s overall body of research focuses on the challenges relating to resource consumption and productivity in urban systems often in the context of planetary resource capacity and extreme climate change.

hadi has previously worked on a spatially multi-scale examination of urban systems and the extent to which their performance is influenced by their embedded physical infrastructure (Arbabi et al., 2020). hadi’s other interests include complexity, urban scaling and allometry (Arbabi & Punzo, 2023), city morphology and infrastructure planning for agglomeration (Arbabi et al., 2019), network analysis of urban flows (Tan et al., 2021), stocks and metabolism (Arbabi et al., 2022).

as of February 2024, hadi has over 180 citations and an h-index of 9 on google scholars.

news

Oct 18, 2023	our written evidence to the energy security and net zero committee’s inquiry, heating our homes, was published along other’s addressing the uk’s residential heating challenge.
Oct 11, 2023	this grantham centre for sustainable futures’ session on the impacts of climate change on migration features my talk on regions at risk, extreme climate change, population & displacement.
Sep 23, 2023	the financial times picks up our research which demonstrated the uk was way off course in efforts to decarbonize the housing sector.
May 10, 2023	this festival of debate event at which i was one of the speakers aims to discuss denser cities and reduction in urban sprawl while also taking a global perspective to understand whether solutions are altered for different people around the world.
May 4, 2023	our research on the whole-life carbon impact of housing retrofit is picked up as a case study in the ice guidance document for pas 2080.
Dec 1, 2022	doncaster mbc have also been working with the university of sheffield to provide insights into whole-life energy characteristics of buildings and thermal profiling.

selected publications

papers

IEEE

A Novel Approach to Climate Resilience of Infrastructure Networks

Qianqian Li, Giuliano Punzo, Craig Robson, Hadi Arbabi, and Martin Mayfield

IEEE Systems Journal, 2024

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With a changing climate, the frequency and intensity of extreme weather events are likely to increase, posing a threat to infrastructure systems’ resilience. The response of infrastructure systems to localised failures depends on whether assets are affected randomly, in a targeted strategic way, or any way in between. More than that, infrastructure decisions today, including new routes or improvements to existing assets, will underpin the behaviour of the systems over the next century. It is important to separate and analyse the case of climate-based disruptions and how they affect systems’ resilience. This paper presents a probabilistic resilience assessment framework where failure scenarios and network disruptions are generated using weather propdf data from climate prediction models with component-level fragility functions. A case study is then carried out to quantify the resilience of Great Britain’s railway passenger transport system to high-temperature-related track buckling under the Representative Concentration Pathway 8.5 (RCP8.5) climate change scenario. A 95-year horizon on the resilience of the railway system is drawn. The results also reveal the non-linear responses of the railway system to the increasing temperature and show that models considering random asset failures overestimate the system’s resilience.
PiRS

Regional Economic Resilience, Trophic Characteristics, and Ecological Analogies

Hadi Arbabi, and Giuliano Punzo

Papers in Regional Science, Dec 2023

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Works on regional resilience have at times borrowed from the engineering and ecological framing of system resilience. In ecological contexts, system resilience is rooted in network structure and its characteristics. Here, we empirically investigate the relationship between regional economic resilience and regional trophic characteristics across regional and national boundaries. We consider 249 NUTS2 regions across 24 countries during the 2000-2010 period. We observe strong links between regional resilience and trophic metrics borrowed from the ecological literature. Our results further highlight regional trophic characteristics as a spatially heterogeneous intermediary for feedback effects between economic structure and output of regions.
JIE

A Scalable Data Collection, Characterization, and Accounting Framework for Urban Material Stocks

Hadi Arbabi, Maud Lanau, Xinyi Li, Gregory Meyers, Menglin Dai, Martin Mayfield, and Danielle Densley Tingley

Journal of Industrial Ecology, Dec 2022

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Building stocks represent an extensive reservoir of secondary resources. However, common bottom-up characterization of these, often based on archetypal classification of buildings and their corresponding material intensity, are still not suitable to adequately inform circular economic strategies. Indeed, these approaches typically result in a loss of building-specific details, and a building stock characterization in terms of material mass, for example, glass, rather than component, for example, window. To deliver this higher resolution of details, a scalable approach to urban stock characterization, that enables a bottom-up estimation of building stocks at the building component level, is needed. In this paper, we present a framework to automate the characterization of urban stock. By using and combining a mobile-sensing approach with computer vision, urban stocks can be captured as 3D surface maps allowing the identification and semantic classification of stock objects, components, and materials. We demonstrate the potential of this framework through a case study of a neighborhood in Sheffield, UK, by using a prototype workflow comprising a custom-made mobile-sensing platform and an existing suite of neural network models to calculate an estimate count of buildings external doors and windows. The prototype implementation of the framework achieves comparable total and building-level component counts with those achieved through manual human counts. Such automated estimation of components enables an understanding of opportunities across the circular economic hierarchies and informs stakeholders across the supply chain to better prepare for the implementation of circular strategies including building refurbishments.
npjUrbSus

Mapping Resource Effectiveness across Urban Systems

Ling Min Tan, Hadi Arbabi, Danielle Densley Tingley, Paul E. Brockway, and Martin Mayfield

npj Urban Sustainability, Dec 2021

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Cities and their growing resource demands threaten global resource security. This study identifies the hotspots of imports in cities to redirect resources to where they are most needed, based on the system overall resource effectiveness to maximise the use of all resources available. This paper develops a taxonomy of resource-use behaviour based on the clustering patterns of resource utilisation and conversion across interconnected urban systems. We find high tendencies of consumer-like behaviour in a multi-city system because tertiary sectors are concentrated in urban areas while the producing sectors are located outside and hence, results in high utilisation but low output. The clustering taxonomy emphasises that the absence of producers in the system causes cities to rely on the imported resources for growth. Cities can be resource-effective by having a more diversified industrial structure to extend the pathways of resource flows, closing the circularity gap between the suppliers and consumers.
JRSS A

Productivity, Infrastructure and Urban Density—an Allometric Comparison of Three European City Regions Across Scales

Hadi Arbabi, Martin Mayfield, and Philip McCann

Journal of the Royal Statistical Society: Series A (Statistics in Society), Dec 2020

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Agglomeration-based arguments citing Dutch and German city regions have been a primary driver in advocating intercity transport strategies in the north of England.We adopt an allometric urban model investigating the applicability and transferability of these transport-led agglomerative strategies promoted to address England’s regional economic underperformance. This is undertaken through a comparative study of the size–cost performance balance of three city regions and the overall urban networks in the Netherlands and Germany, and England and Wales by using city units defined at different spatial scales. Although our results support a case for better mobility and transport comparing the three urban networks regardless of the spatial scales, comparisons of specific city regions indicate a more nuanced interplay of productivity, mobility infrastructure and urban density.