Current Grant Projects
Through our Urban Innovation Grants, the Mansueto Institute supports innovators across the University of Chicago—and across disciplines—focused on critical issues and topics impacting cities. Our goal is to develop bold thinking through a range of methods and approaches for understanding urban environments and shape positive outcomes in communities and urban areas. We also aim to amplify the University of Chicago’s urban research and scholarship across the social sciences, environmental and health sciences, the arts and humanities, and public policy. Learn more about projects we’re supporting:
2024–2025
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Mapping Hyde Park
Project lead
Assistant Professor of Comparative Human Development, the University of Chicago
Collaborators
Associate Professor of Islamic Studies and Anthropology of Religion, the University of Chicago Divinity School, and the Seldon Institute
How do institutions define a neighborhood, not just in their rhetoric but in the ways they operate and occupy a local ecosystem? This project, entitled Mapping Hyde Park, seeks to map how religious, educational and cultural organizations construct the neighborhood through their programming and collaborations. Mapping Hyde Park is a collaborative, applied research project with Seldon Institute, whose mission is to facilitate critical thought on Islam and Muslims. Through an exploration of the various institutional definitions of “neighborhood,” we seek to understand how these definitions were formed, how they inform organizational programs and services, how these programs are perceived by organizational constituents and intended audiences, how these organizations and their programs are perceived by surrounding communities, and what kind of programming we can offer to help engage Hyde Park communities in authentic conversations that work towards a more collaborative definition of neighborhood.
How Things Fall Apart
Project lead
Assistant Professor, Crown Family School of Social Work, Policy, and Practice
Climate and Mental Health in Chicago: A Mixed-methods Evaluation of Temperature Impacts in a Vulnerable Population
Project lead
Assistant Professor of Public Health Sciences, the University of Chicago
Collaborators
Assistant Professor of Family Medicine, the University of Chicago
The objective of this project is to enhance our understanding of the connections between ambient temperature and mental health within marginalized communities in Chicago. Higher temperatures associated with climate change may increase the risk of mental health disorders including substance abuse, anxiety and mood disorders, schizophrenia, and self-harm. Temperature may impact mental health via physiological stressors (e.g. brain inflammation) and/or by reducing health maintenance behaviors (e.g. exercise or sleep). However, only limited research focuses on the unique vulnerabilities of marginalized communities, such as low-income areas or communities of color, especially in urban settings. Temperature is predominantly regarded as a “risk multiplier,” as it is more likely to exacerbate preexisting vulnerabilities than it is to precipitate isolated mental health issues. In this project, Burrows and McGuinn will evaluate the association between temperature and mental health among Black women residing in Chicago’s South Side. They will use a digital health approach to capture detailed self-reported mental health symptoms from participants (using ecological momentary assessment) and physiological data (from wearable smartwatches) to give a complete picture of subclinical mental health symptoms. This digital health data will be linked with individual and area-level temperature data, thus providing a more accurate assessment of the impact of temperature variations on the continuum of mental health outcomes in this vulnerable urban population.
Trauma Interest Work Group: What Does Safety Mean to You? Community Perspectives on Safety Speaker Series
Project lead
Associate Professor of Psychiatry and Behavioral Neuroscience, the University of Chicago
The problem we aim to address is the multifaceted issue of safety in urban environments, particularly within the University of Chicago campus and surrounding communities. Our approach involves continuing the Trauma Interest Work Group’s “What Does Safety Mean to You? Community Perspectives on Safety Speaker Series,” which serves as a platform for exploring diverse perspectives on safety. Through curated forums, we aim to delve into the historical and current contexts of policies, practices, and attitudes shaping safety perceptions and experiences. All voices and perspectives will be welcomed and valued, fostering a comprehensive understanding of safety issues in our urban context.
American Politics Conference, Panel on Urban and Local Politics
Project lead
Assistant Professor, Harris School of Public Policy
Collaborators
Assistant Professor, Harris School of Public Policy
Assistant Professor, Harris School of Public Policy
Local government has clear and direct impacts on the everyday lives of residents through public services related to public safety (e.g., police, fire protection), public works and infrastructure (e.g., water and sewers, waste, roads), social and education policies (e.g., schools, housing), and more. Despite these direct impacts, political scientists tend to devote far more attention to federal and state governments than to local governments. To counteract this deficit in attention on local matters, the Center for Effective Government is featuring an urban and local politics panel in this year’s American Politics Conference. The panel will address some of the most pressing questions related to urban and local politics, including how the timing of local elections—on-cycle vs. off-cycle—impacts local political and policy outcomes. By assembling the top experts on American politics, including those with expertise on local government, the conference, and in particular this panel focused on urban politics, serves to disseminate this innovative research on urban and local politics.
Zoning in American Cities: Are Reforms Making a Difference? An AI-based Analysis
Project lead
Mansueto Institute and Division of Social Sciences Postdoctoral Fellow, the University of Chicago
Collaborators
Professor of Urbanism, Division of the Social Sciences, the University of Chicago
Governments use zoning regulations to manage land use, significantly shaping economic and social outcomes in urban areas. There is wide recognition that zoning regulations are problematic in terms of equity and sustainability goals, and as a result, reform efforts have been underway for the past two decades. Many of these are known as “form-based codes” or FBCs, which focus on urban form as opposed to urban land use. They are an alternative approach to conventional zoning, intended to support mixed-use, equitable, pedestrian-oriented environments. A comprehensive nationwide analysis of these reform efforts is currently lacking. This is largely due to the unstructured text format of these codes, which makes it difficult to assess them quantitatively and comparatively across different regions. This project will use natural language processing techniques, including ChatGPT, to develop quantitative metrics that will evaluate zoning reform efforts. Our ultimate goal is to provide a data-driven understanding of zoning’s influence on major societal challenges, which will enable an improved assessment of municipal regulation and its impact.
Community Applications of Hyper-Local Urban Climate Data
Project lead
Marshini Chetty
Associate Professor in the Department of Computer Science, University of Chicago
Collaborators
Scott Collis
Department head and Atmospheric Scientist and Measurement Strategy lead for CROCUS , Argonne National Laboratory
The goal of this research is to inform how urban communities can use hyper-local climate data. As climate change presents new threats to urban areas, understanding the weather is critical for both short-term planning as well as longer-term infrastructure investment decisions. Currently, weather is reported at a city-scale and weather reports are conveyed to Chicago residents via apps and websites. Using advancements in artificial intelligence (AI) and edge computing, scientists at Argonne National Lab are developing a sensor network in Chicago to measure weather at a finer-grained, neighborhood-level scale through the Community Research on Climate and Urban Science (CROCUS) initiative. It is unclear, however, how this more localized climate data will be meaningfully conveyed to residents. Moreover, it is uncertain how urban residents can be integrated into, and benefit from, scientific AI systems such as this one. In this project, we seek to understand and prototype a way for Chicago communities to use this hyper-local climate data, with implications for the development of future AI systems in urban areas. We have partnered with the CROCUS team at Argonne National Lab as well as a Chatham community organization, where one of the CROCUS nodes will be deployed. We plan to run a series of co-design sessions with approximately 15 residents. These co-design sessions will focus on understanding climate-related needs and concerns in the neighborhood and iteratively develop an app that makes use of the hyper-local data. The deliverables for the project will be a publication as well as an app prototype.
2023–2024
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Safer Cities for Kids: Using In-Vehicle Telematics Data to Evaluate How Urban Policies and the Built Environment Affect Road Traffic Injuries
Project lead
Associate Professor, Department of Public Health Sciences, the University of Chicago
Collaborators
Associate Professor and Director, Biostatistics Laboratory, Department of Public Health Sciences, the University of Chicago
This project aims to assess the potential of using in-vehicle telematics data to evaluate how urban policies and the built environment affect road traffic injuries. Vehicular telematics is an emerging source of big data, which includes time-stamped information on vehicle location, aggressive driving — such as harsh braking/acceleration, high acceleration cornering, and speeding — and crash events.
While it is increasingly common for insurance companies to use telematics data for “rate making,” such as identifying safe/risky drivers for deciding who to keep in the insurance pool, there have been few applications of telematics data to public policy analysis. Therefore, we will conduct two evaluations as case studies: (1) Effects of Chicago’s red-light camera system on harsh braking and crashes; and (2) Effect of reduced lane widths on aggressive driving behaviors, like speeding and harsh braking/acceleration.
The findings of this pilot project will support an application for a federal grant to the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development focused on developing and applying analytical methods that use telematics data for a wide range of evaluations focused on the safety of children in cities.
Planetary Urbanization, Energy Landscapes, and Environmental Sustainability
Project lead
Lucy Flower Professor of Urban Sociology and Director, Urban Theory Lab, Department of Sociology and Committee on Environment, Geography and Urbanization (CEGU)
Collaborators
Senior Research Associate in Global Political Ecology, Urban Theory Lab and Faculty Affiliate, CEGU
Senior Research Associate in Cartography and Spatial Media, Urban Theory Lab and Faculty Affiliate, CEGU
In the face of proliferating environmental emergencies, the question of urban sustainability has gained unprecedented urgency. However, the dominant paradigm of urban sustainability research focuses on city-based activities, and renders invisible a key environmental dimension of urbanization — cities’ exchange of energy, materials, and waste with non-city spaces. In contrast, this research project aims to explore: (a) how the world’s major metropolitan regions have secured their energy supplies over the longue durée of capitalist development; and (b) how such energy landscapes have been restructured and relocated since the consolidation of a fossil fuel-based formation of capitalism in the 1850s.
This investigation will, in turn: (c) provide a basis on which to reconsider contemporary debates on sustainable urbanism with reference to the massive hinterland footprints associated with renewable energy systems. Through these interconnected inquiries, the project will advance a new conception of sustainable urbanization that grants equal weight to city-based consumption and hinterland energy landscapes.
Given the immense practical import of the issues under investigation, this research will contribute not only to scholarship, but to ongoing public conversations about the future of cities in our crisis-riven planetary environment.
Defining Chicago’s Neighborhoods: A Crowdsourced Approach
Project lead
Professor of Urbanism, Division of Social Sciences, the University of Chicago
Collaborators
Assistant Instructional Professor of GIScience, the University of Chicago
Postdoctoral Scholar, Mansueto Institute and Division of Social Sciences, the University of Chicago
Chicago is often described as a “city of neighborhoods,” but it has no official neighborhood designations in use. Instead, the city relies on the 77 “community areas” created by Chicago School sociologists over a century ago. Meanwhile, hundreds of spatial proxies for neighborhoods blanket the city, including wards, neighborhood association boundaries, school districts, and census tracts.
What is not known is how these myriad geographies resemble residents’ own conceptions of, and lived experiences in, neighborhoods, and what is obscured by an over-reliance on administrative boundaries defined long ago in a different sociodemographic context.
The motivation for this study is to gain a better understanding of resident definitions of Chicago neighborhoods via crowd-sourced neighborhood boundary drawings. To that end, we build on related research that asks respondents to draw the boundaries of their neighborhoods, and then assess similarities and differences in residents’ mental representations of local geography.
Our goal is to answer two research questions. First, how do resident-generated neighborhood boundaries compare with other definitions of neighborhoods, such as community areas and neighborhood association boundaries)? Second, how do perceived neighborhood boundaries vary with respect to respondent location and respondent identity, such as race, socioeconomic status, and length of tenure? The survey is now available at the Chicago Neighborhood Project.