Measuring Community Resilience to COVID-19: A Dashboard for Decision-Making

Keywords: community building, resilience, COVID response, municipalities, urban planning, data visualization
Session Type: Virtual Guided Poster Abstract
Day: Saturday
Session Start / End Time: 2/26/2022 05:20 PM (Eastern Time (US & Canada)) - 2/26/2022 06:40 PM (Eastern Time (US & Canada))
Room: Virtual 63

Abstract

Queen's University, Kingston Economic Development Corporation, City of Kingston, and the Kingston Association of Museums, Art Galleries and Historic Sites have collaborated to create a data-driven decision-making tool that can support community planning and help measure municipal resilience to COVID 19. An online interactive ‘dashboard’ provides a range of indicators describing Kingston, ON and allows planners to compare the municipality with federal and provincial indicators. Indicators are grouped by overarching themes of Business Resilience, Employment, Community Vulnerabilities and Supports, Mobility, Environment and Sustainability, Housing, and Cultural Heritage. Links to recent Kingston-centric research (dissertations, theses) related to dashboard themes created at Queen's University provide users with the opportunity to explore methodologies and analyses related to individual research themes. Creditable data sources including Statistics Canada are used, and linked dynamically to the dashboard via data collection scripts and scheduling services. Advanced computing techniques including visualization are used to animate the dashboard and make it accessible to a wide range of users. Indicators provide insight into baseline and historic information and illustrate Kingston’s pandemic resilience during the COVID-19 pandemic, the inequities exacerbated by the pandemic and the on-the-ground impacts influencing the everyday lives of Kingston residents. The dashboard will ultimately provide a platform of gathered data which will help to inform policy and strengthen Kingston’s ability to (re)build post-pandemic.