Rahul Mehrotra, chair of the department of urban planning and design at the Harvard Design School, has a team on site mapping and photographing the city that has sprung up here.
No nationwide survey of the insects' numbers has been published since former RAF pilot and school teacher Bob George, who began mapping them in the 1950s, published his Atlas of the Fleas of Britain and Ireland in 2008.
He pledged to push ahead with electronic school report cards, online GP appointment booking, neighbourhood "crime mapping" and video identification of suspects.