Collegium Helveticum
Switzerland
fellow
Yael Borofsky
2023-2024
Discipline(s)
Economy and finance; Urban and architectural studies
Theme(s)
Cities & States; Energy & Renewable Resources
Fellowship dates
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Biography
Yael Borofsky (born 1987 in Philadelphia, PA, United States) is a development economist and urban planner. Her research focuses on access to basic infrastructure, especially electricity services, in informal settlements. From sensors to participatory mapping, she aims to use transdisciplinary data collection methods so that residents of informal settlements can more directly shape the research, see their own neighborhoods from a new perspective, and use the information to achieve community development goals.
Yael received her PhD in 2022 from ETH Zurich. In her doctoral thesis, she worked on an inter- and transdisciplinary randomized impact evaluation of public streetlighting in an informal settlement in Cape Town, South Africa. Before joining the Collegium, she was a postdoctoral researcher and research manager in the Development Economics Group at ETH Zurich (2022–2023). She is a co-founding editor of the ETH Zurich Energy Blog and a founding member of the LightUp Collective.
Research Project
Energy in the Inclusive City: Towards Equitable Energy Access in Cities with High Informality
More than ten percent of people globally (about one billion people) live in low-income, urban informal settlements. Many of them lack reliable electricity for household use, economic activity, or public light. Yet, there is little comprehensive data about how many lack access, so it is hard to know the scale of the problem or find solutions. This project draws on large language models and other language processing techniques to estimate the scale of the problem by building a comprehensive database of existing, but disparate information.
Despite an international push for “inclusive” cities and energy for all, without access in informal settlements, this vision cannot be achieved. Yael hypothesizes that using the database to build a visualization tool targeted at policymakers will draw needed attention from the international development community and inspire policy solutions. She will draw on a transdisciplinary array of thinkers to build this tool and aims to see whether it can be used to define a target for electricity access in informal settlements that can be adopted by international development frameworks, such as the UN Sustainable Development Goals.
Research Interests:
Architecture; urbanism; sustainable development; politics