Joshua Vargas is a Research Assistant at Future Cities Laboratory Global (FCL), an interdisciplinary urban science research group at the Singapore-ETH Centre. There, he contributes to the deployment and development of ur-scape, a geospatial planning support tool created in collaboration with the Asian Development Bank, the Swiss Secretariat for Economic Affairs, and other government and inter-governmental organisations. He is also Co-Founder and Co-President of the Young Urbanists of Southeast Asia (YUSEA), a new commmunity of young people passionate about Southeast Asian cities.
He hails from Zamboanga City in the Philippines. As a high school student at Ateneo de Zamboanga, he volunteered with SUGPAT, an NGO supported by UNICEF and ING to support the development of youth displaced by the 2013 Zamboanga siege. After a vehicular accident where he was hit by a truck in 2016, he became an advocate for urban child safety and social protection. He spoke at the UNICEF Asia Pacific’s Growing Up Urban Surabaya 2018 meeting of mayors on this issue. Seeing people do difficult and interesting work around the world to create social impact inspired him to study and work in social science research and data-driven policy.
Thanks to financial aid support from donors, he was granted admission at Yale-NUS College, a liberal arts college established by Yale University and the National University of Singapore. There, he contributed to Assistant Professor Justin D Stern’s research on economic development policy in Philippine cities, and under his supervision later won the Outstanding Capstone Prize in Urban Studies for his work establishing how the emergence of remote work impacts outsourcing and tech workers' locational decisions in post-COVID Philippine economic geography. His training includes coursework on policy, urban design, social theory, research tools, data science, and software engineering.
In 2023, he graduated Summa Cum Laude with a major in Urban Studies and a minor in Mathematical, Computational, and Statistical Sciences (MCS) specialising in Data Science. He was the 2023 recipient of the Lee Kuan Yew Gold Medal, an award given to the top graduate of the Yale-NUS Bachelor of Arts (BA) programme.
Before joining FCL, he also held internship positions at government relations agency Landmark Public Affairs (now part of Edelman Global Advisory); strategic consultancy Desire Lines; and Urban Studies Lab, a leading interdisciplinary think tank in Thailand. In his work experiences, he drafted policy recommendations for inclusive urban data systems design; developed prototypes for research communications and social work web apps, including a LINE chatbot; and produced communications materials seen by thousands worldwide.
In 2023, Joshua was elected to the Singapore Institute of Planners as a Student Member.
