My First PhD Journal Article published in Nature Cities.
As of yesterday, it has officially been two years since I started my PhD.
When I moved to Karlstad University, Sweden, I was a little anxious about starting this new phase of my life. But I was also hopeful, mainly because I really liked the supervisors I was going to work with.
Two years later, that feeling has only grown stronger, with amazing PhD colleagues who have become dear friends and supervisors who have encouraged me, listened to me, given me opportunities, and most importantly, believed in me.
So today feels special.
I am very happy to share my first PhD paper, now published in Nature Cities: “Hidden living-condition deficits in small and medium-sized cities.”
This work took almost a year and became much more collaborative than I initially imagined.
A lot of this comes from the environment my supervisor Stefanos Georganos created around the PhD. Stef has always believed strongly in collaboration and in working with people who are genuinely passionate about what they do and about why they do it. Being surrounded by people like that definitely rubs off on you, and I am very happy to now be part of this network myself.
The idea started when Dana R Thomson brought the City Segments dataset to us, and we began exploring whether simple proxies of urban morphology, population, parcels and road accessibility could help distinguish morphologically deprived and non-deprived areas.
When the IDEAtlas ITC team released the IDEABench benchmark dataset, the idea really started taking shape.
Eventually, it grew into a study covering 5,132 cities across 103 countries in Africa, Asia, and Latin America and the Caribbean. We estimate that around 395 million people in the covered cities live in morphologically deprived neighbourhoods, with 136 million of them living in small and medium-sized cities. That was one of the findings that stayed with me most. Urban deprivation is not only a megacity story. A huge part of it exists across smaller cities that often receive much less attention in research, data and policy.
A big thank you to the IDEAtlas/ITC team (Monika Kuffer, Bedru Wdye, Claudio Persello, Raian V. Maretto, Angela Abascal) for IDEABench and the collaboration, to Dana Thomson and Alejandro Blei for City Segments, and to John Friesen for all the brainstorming, interpretation, graphics and feedback throughout the work.
And a huge thank you to Dana and Stefanos for believing in me, trusting me with the work, and travelling this long journey together to turn an idea into a paper and dataset I am genuinely proud of.
The CSMD data and code are openly available, and there is also a web viewer to explore the data on a map.
So please use it, test it, challenge it, and tell us where it works and where it does not.
Two years into the PhD, seeing this finally online feels like a pretty good way to mark the journey so far.
Links
Paper doi: https://doi.org/10.1038/s44284-026-00498-w
Webviewer: https://saiga143.github.io/csmd-viewer
Zenodo Repo: https://zenodo.org/records/20486977
Veeravalli, S.G., Blei, A.M., Friesen, J. et al. Hidden living-condition deficits in small and medium-sized cities. Nat Cities (2026). https://doi.org/10.1038/s44284-026-00498-w