How Social Cohesion & Agent-Based Modelling Fuel Urban Climate Resilience

In the quest for climate-resilient cities, we often look to the sky—tracking air quality, heat islands, and wind patterns. But at UrbanAIR, we know that a city’s resilience is determined as much by the people on the ground as by the atmosphere above them. This is the core of our work on behavioural modelling, led by researchers like Aulia Sukma and Amineh Ghorbani at TU Delft. 

Ghorbani in a community garden in Rotterdam: Collective initiatives like this help people build trust to one another, and tackle challenges they would never face alone.

Agent-Based Modelling: The Human Element of the Digital Twin 

While the UrbanAIR Digital Twin (DT) uses advanced meteorological models to pinpoint street-level hotspots, its true power lies in its "human" layer. As Amineh Ghorbani explains in the TU Delft Stories,

"Social cohesion is the feeling of connectedness that prevents people from becoming isolated". 

Today, Ghorbani works on large-scale European and Dutch initiatives, such as UrbanAIR, alongside projects like JustREACH and ECCO, to develop tools that help communities become resilient.

Within UrbanAIR, this sociological insight is being translated into technical innovation through the work of researcher Aulia Sukma. Under Ghorbani’s supervision, Sukma is developing behavioural models that simulate how social cohesion influences individual and collective responses to climate stressors like heat and poor air quality. When a heatwave hits, does a resident stay isolated in a top-floor apartment, or does a strong social network prompt a neighbour to check on them? Sukma’s work, focused on agent-based modelling (ABM), translates these social dynamics into the Digital Twin, allowing planners to see how "social infrastructure" can be just as protective as a cooling green space.

Aulia presenting her agent-based modelling work at the UrbanAIR meeting in London, November 2025

Why Social Cohesion Matters for Climate Justice 

Resilience means that people have the capacity to respond together. Research shows that groups of around 40 households can form powerful units of local strength. Within such a group, people can organise, share information, and support the vulnerable—actions that are central to the climate justice discourse championed by the UrbanAIR project. 

As highlighted by the UrbanAIR team at the 10th EMES International Conference in 2025, climate resilience is inseparable from social equity. Vulnerable groups often live in areas with the highest heat stress and the lowest social "safety nets". Modelling these disparities—using analytical lenses of responsibility, capacity, and justice—Sukma and Ghorbani help municipalities identify not just where the heat is, but where the social fabric needs reinforcing. As Aulia notes, the goal is to ensure that all households, regardless of socio-economic status, have equitable access to protect themselves during extreme heat events. 

Where social cohesion begins

According to Ghorbani, social cohesion cannot be forced; it grows from physical spaces—community gardens, shared kitchens, or even an unused greenhouse—that lower the threshold for meeting. 

‘People should feel welcome and not left out,’

she says. Barriers must be minimal, participation should be voluntary, and the activity should recur, not just a once-a-year barbecue.

Successful communities come together for a collective purpose that goes beyond material benefits.

UrbanAIR is taking these insights and turning them into decision-support tools. By simulating different "what-if" scenarios, the Digital Twin can show policymakers how a new community park doesn't just lower the temperature, but also increases the "social connectivity score" of a neighbourhood. This work directly informs distributive policy design, helping cities like Antwerp, Barcelona, and Paris become more resilient to future crises like floods or air pollution spikes. 

Driven by Connection 

For Aulia Sukma, the motivation to bridge technical engineering and social science is what drives her work. "Combining both technical and social fields has always been my go-to path," she says, finding excitement in how diverse perspectives create the synergy needed for fair and resilient cities. 

This focus on the "human engine" of resilience is central to the UrbanAIR project. Most recently, this work was presented at the ICRS 2026 conference, where Sukma shared her research on "From Households to Communities: Collective Action Pathways for Equitable Heat Adaptation". The study highlights how Community-Based Adaptation (CBA) can empower local agencies and redistribute responsibility to ensure that adaptation efforts are truly inclusive. 

In a world facing rising heat and social pressure, resilience doesn’t come from technology alone. It grows from trust, from neighbours who know each other, and from the digital tools that help us protect that bond. 

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The article is authored by Georgia Nikolakopoulou, adapted by the TU Delft Stories, (March 2026. Photography: Voedseltuin Rotterdam & Erno Wientjes). Georgia is part of the Future Needs team, leading Dissemination, Communication and Exploitation of the UrbanAIR project.