May 16, 2023

Often urbanists and archaeologists assume that cities of the past had neighborhoods, but rarely is this assumption tested. A new paper published in the Journal of Anthropological Archaeology by Adrian S.Z. Chase, a Mansueto Institute Postdoctoral Fellow and Department of Anthropology Postdoctoral Scholar at the University of Chicago, finds that neighborhoods did indeed exist in the ancient Maya city of Caracol, around 700 CE — in what is now modern Belize — based on studies of remote sensing data and archeological artifacts. Chase used Lidar, which stands for Light Detection and Ranging, a technology that uses light in the form of a laser to measure distances to the Earth, to model face-to-face interaction, on-foot travel times, and the locations of social spaces in the ancient city. He also examined material from the archaeological record representing nearly 40 years of fieldwork related to residential rituals. The results supported that where he had identified potential neighborhoods represent actual neighborhoods. Learn more from a CBS special about the archeological site, and a blog about field work in Caracol.

March 1, 2023

Cities with greater civic capacity, such as pro-social nonprofit organizations and community associations, embraced environmentally-friendlier building earlier than those lacking a vibrant civil society, according to a new paper by Christof Brandtner that was the lead article in the Nov. 2022 issue of the American Journal of Sociology. Brandtner, a former postdoctoral fellow at the Mansueto Institute and current assistant professor of social innovation at emlyon in France, analyzed data on every building newly constructed between 2000 and 2016 in a U.S. municipality that applied for LEED certification for energy efficient design. In industrialized cities, buildings make up 50–70% of carbon emissions, making them a significant target for mitigating carbon emissions. Brandtner also wrote an article for the Conversation about his findings.The Mansueto Institute had originally published the paper in the institute’s Working Paper Series.

November 15, 2022

The Mansueto Institute has published a report on the institute’s first five years. Started in 2017 with a generous gift from Joe Mansueto, AB ’78, MBA ’80, and Rika Mansueto, AB ’91, the institute has aimed to put cities at the heart of the University of Chicago, creating a culture of interdisciplinarity and innovation across campus and beyond. The report describes how, in its first five years the Mansueto Institute has: seeded initiatives to develop new ways of addressing city life, from housing to the environment to mental health to infrastructure; brought together disciplines from the natural, computational, and social sciences as well as the arts and humanities, to work on a variety of research projects, education and training programs, and conversations and events; supported the work of faculty, staff, and students across the university, encouraging a culture of collaboration, exchange, and excellence; and advanced the emerging discipline of urban science, based on the principle that cities around the globe share many fundamental processes and characteristics that can be studied.

October 10, 2022

The Mansueto Institute and Center for Spatial Data Science have released an interactive data visualization tool called Taking the American Pulse, which enables users to explore and gain insight from a U.S. Census survey of Americans in metropolitan areas across the country on how they are experiencing the pandemic in areas like education and childcare, mental health, food security, and spending, with often significant disparities across race, education, and place. The tool is meant to help inform important public policy questions around housing, stimulus support, child tax credits, mental health, and COVID-19.

September 7, 2022

The U.S. Department of Energy has awarded Argonne National Laboratory and a team of academic and community leaders $25 million over five years to advance urban climate science by studying climate change effects. The grant establishes a center called the Community Research on Climate and Urban Science or CROCUS, focusing on informing communities to build resilience to future effects of climate change in the Chicago region. The Mansueto Institute will head the University of Chicago’s affiliation with the center.

August 25, 2022

More than 500 scholars from around the world came to Chicago in July for the 8th International Conference on Computational Social Science (IC2S2), the young field’s premier gathering. The event, held at the Harper Center and co-organized by the Knowledge Lab, Center for Applied Artificial Intelligence, and the Mansueto Institute, cut across disciplinary boundaries to engage both computer and social scientists in conversations about research and technical approaches to unlock future discoveries.

July 31, 2022

Luís Bettencourt, director of the Mansueto Institute, gave a keynote at the World Cities Summit’s Science of Cities Symposium in Singapore on July 31 called “Complexity Science for Adaptive and Sustainable Cities.” The event convened international researchers, city, and industry leaders to share their scientific insights and methodologies on tackling urban challenges. Bettencourt discussed applying complexity science and an integrated systems approach as cities are confronted with interconnected challenges, such as climate change, changing demographics, aging populations, and changing local and global economic structures. The event was covered in Singapore’s Straits Times newspaper.

July 21, 2022

Various theories of criminology connect crime patterns with different levels of geography, such as the widely cited “Broken Windows” theory that posits that neighborhood-level disorder “invites” crime. A new paper published in the Journal of Research in Crime and Delinquency by Alexandra Ciomek, a postdoctoral fellow at the Mansueto Institute and Crown Family School of Social Work, Policy, and Practice at UChicago, and Daniel O’Brien of Northeastern University, investigates three geographic areas — specific addresses, including houses and apartment buildings; particular streets; or entire neighborhoods — to understand at which level disorder most often leads to occurring violent crime and at which level crime persists from year to year. Focusing on Boston from 2011 to 2016, Ciomek and O’Brien examined 911 and 311 data on violent crime and physical and social disorder such as graffiti, trash, loud disturbances, and landlord-tenant conflicts. They found crime followed disorder and persisted more often at addresses, while violence did reoccur on a street or in a neighborhood. Law enforcement and community leaders should focus on all levels — problem properties, hotspot streets, and community policing — when designing interventions, the authors write. Read a tweet thread about the paper.

July 19, 2022

Chris Esposito, a postdoctoral fellow at the Mansueto Institute and Knowledge Lab at UChicago, published a paper in the Journal of Economic Geography called “Cycles of Regional Growth,” looking at how cities rise as innovative centers, why they fall, and if cities can re-surge after falling. Using data from eight million patents granted to U.S.-based inventors between 1850 and 1999, Esposito describes a general process that cities undergo as they innovate. He finds that cities generally pass through a three-stage process as they grow as innovative centers, and that it is rare for cities that have declined to experience second waves of local innovative growth. Read Esposito’s tweet thread summarizing the paper.

June 8, 2022

Sabina Shaikh, director of the Program on the Global Environment at University of Chicago, a partner of the Mansueto Institute, appeared on WTTW Chicago to talk about a new study that finds Cook County has been a destination for some people moving as a result of climate change. Shaikh noted that although the region is protected from some aspects of climate change, it is vulnerable to localized flooding and heat, and has a history of deadly heatwaves, especially for those who don’t have easy access to cooling infrastructure, green space or other types of heat mitigation. “How Midwestern cities prepare for this will have a big impact on what happens, and the burden of these impacts will be greatly disproportionate unless we plan for it and pay attention to the conditions that have led to urban, environmental and health injustices,” Shaikh said.

March 22, 2022

Luís Bettencourt, director of the Mansueto Institute, co-authored a paper in Current Anthropology on how hunter-gatherer settlement patterns could have become more permanent and even evolved into cities. Unlike agrarian societies, hunter-gatherer camps are typically temporary and do not have key characteristics of cities, like density that increases with the size of a population or formal social structures. However, some hunter-gatherer societies have become denser and more permanent. In order to understand how this happens, the authors modeled a data set of 1,760 hunter-gather camps from 112 groups from all around the world. They used this model to characterize a scaling pattern that would lead to such societies becoming settled. They found these societies could have become more dense and permanent by storing food other resources, even though, unlike agrarian societies, they did not use domesticated food production.

March 10, 2022

The Biological Sciences Division and the Mansueto Institute for Urban Innovation at University of Chicago are hosting a speaker series that addresses climate change and its impact on public health and ecosystems and biological diversity. The series is intended to stimulate cross-disciplinary conversation and collaboration on topics around sustainable development and climate change, according to the events’ organizers. The “Distinguished Speaker Colloquium on Biological Sciences and Climate Change” takes place on three Fridays in February and March from 12-1 PM Central Time. Speakers are Jonathan Patz, Tony J. McMichael Professor and John P. Holton Chair of Health and the Environment and Director of the Global Health Institute at the University of Wisconsin at Madison on February 18 (video); Sari Kovats, Associate Professor in the Department of Public Health, Environments and Society at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine on March 11; and Claire Kremen, Professor and President’s Excellence Chair in Biodiversity at University of British Columbia, on March 25.

January 14, 2021

A paper published in the journal Urban Sustainability, co-authored by Luis Bettencourt and Anne Dodge, with Jose Lobo, an associate professor at Arizona State University’s Global Institute of Sustainability and Innovation, former institute fellow Anni Beukes, and a group of academics from a variety of disciplines, proposes a new academic training program in the emerging field of sustainable urban systems science. “The challenge of sustainability is an urban challenge,” the authors write. A few universities already offer such programs, which bring together faculty and students from disciplines like economics, geography, sociology, ecology, anthropology, archaeology, history, transportation engineering, and complexity science. Core features include studying complex systems and the history of human settlements and learning how to collect and analyze community-level data and create models for future decision-making. Students are prepared to work not just in academic careers but for working for laboratories; city governments; businesses; or policy, community or civic organizations. “We feel that the twin forces of urbanization and climate change call for a rapid institutional response,” the authors write.

The Mansueto Institute’s 2021 accomplishments on research about cities and urbanization, training the next generation of urban scholars, and building a transformative network of partnerships around urban science and innovation.

Dr. Sabina Shaikh, Director of UChicago’s Program on Global Environment, sat down with WTTW to discuss climate-motivated migration. Shaikh discussed the future of climate refugees–people that have been forced to migrate or displaced by acts of climate change, such as natural disasters or rising sea levels. The roots of climate migration go much deeper than just natural events, as people with less socioeconomic resources are often the most vulnerable populations to forced displacement.

August 15, 2021

Read our latest newsletter featuring the release of Introduction to Urban Science, a new book from Institute Director Dr. Luis Bettencourt. Additionally, check out Andrew Stier, Marc Berman, and Dr. Bettencourt’s “Lower Rates of Depression” paper in the news and learn more about new and exciting research opportunities for students with the Urban Research Corps and the Kreisman Fellowship.

The year 2020 will be remembered as a time when our societies were severely tested, not only in terms of health response to the pandemic, but especially our collective thinking and action on issues of equity and justice. Read a letter from our director Luis Bettencourt.

The emergence of India as an urbanized nation is one of the most significant socioeconomic and political processes of the 21st century. In this paper, authors Sahasranaman and Bettencourt analyze data from the Census of India using the framework of urban scaling to systematically characterize the relative properties of Indian urban slums.

In the Chicago Tribune, check out 19 steps on how to finally start saving the planet, according to environmental experts and UChicago Program on the Global Environment Professors Sabina Shaikh and Evan Carver.

Mansueto Institute lead data scientist Nicholas Marchio was on CBS Chicago to discuss whether or not the polls got it right. (They didn’t.) Watch this video to find out what happened, and whether we can trust them in the future.

This summer, nine undergraduate students turned their environmental commitments into campus actions through the Environmental Frontiers Campus program. Students collaborated remotely with University of Chicago faculty and staff for 10 weeks researching energy and water use at the University.

Center for Spatial Data Science’s Marynia Kolak speaks on NPR’s All Things Considered about county-level hot spots of Coronavirus, particularly on spillover happening in border areas like the Mississippi River area from Memphis, Tennessee to Arkansas.

The Mansueto Institute’s Human Development Index project has been named Innovation of the Month by MetroLab Network and Government Technology magazine. Find out how we’re measuring people’s quality of life at the neighborhood level and how it intersects with the COVID-19 pandemic.

Neil Sheth, Mansueto Institute Doctoral Fellow and UChicago Pritzker School of Medicine MD-PhD candidate, joins ABC 7 Chicago’s I-TEAM report on how Chicago communities where essential workers live are being hit hard by COVID-19. Watch the full video.

The latest episode of UChicago’s “COVID 2025” video series features Luis Bettencourt, Mansueto Institute Inaugural Director, who discusses how COVID-19 will challenge and change cities in the next 5 years. Watch the video here.

New analysis from Luis Bettencourt and Urban Cognition Lab researchers Marc Berman and Andrew Stier quantifies how COVID-19 has attacked large U.S. cities at much higher rates. Although large cities are dealing with faster growing outbreaks, they may also have the socioeconomic institutions and infrastructure to respond more aggressively.

“How can phrases such as ‘in solidarity’ truly activate an ethics of care in all aspects of our lives?” Nicole Rosner, Mansueto Fellow, and Daniela Rosner, of Human Centered Design & Engineering (HCDE) of the University of Washington, consider how designers should reflect and adapt in the age of COVID-19. Read more in Interactions Magazine.

Density, decisive action and luck are all factors in why the West Coast’s outbreaks are less terrifying than the East’s so far. Read more in The Globe and Mail about Luis Bettencourt and University of Chicago colleagues’ findings on the spread of COVID-19 in cities.

Though urban areas like New York City are getting the lion’s share of media attention for their coronavirus outbreaks, researchers at the University of Chicago Center for Spatial Data Science find there are rapidly forming hot spots across the United States, including in southern states such as Arkansas, Tennessee and Mississippi.

By adjusting for population, researchers at the University of Chicago’s Center for Spatial Data Science have identified rural areas in several states that could be disproportionally affected by COVID-19.

The UN estimates that one billion people worldwide live in informal settlements, which lack adequate access to street networks. The Million Neighborhoods map analyzes city blocks in these informal neighborhoods to estimate where streets are needed to catch up with their formal counterparts.

Read more about Luis Bettencourt’s approach to studying cities as complex systems on World Resources Institute’s blog, TheCityFix, on urban sustainability and development.

New research in Science Advances from Mansueto Institute Postdoctoral Fellow Kyoung Whan Choe and the University of Chicago’s Jalisha Jenifer and Psychology Professor Marc Berman produces the first experimental evidence linking math anxiety and math avoidance, and insights on how to break this relationship in order to increase interest and success in STEM fields.

El físico que se propuso estudiar un millón de barrios para mejorar las ciudades. Read about the Million Neighborhoods Map and Luis Bettencourt’s research in El País.

The year 2019 marks the end of our second annual cycle: It was a busy year, characterized by fast growth and development. In the spirit of a new decade of progress and possibilities, here’s a countdown of memorable moments at the Mansueto Institute this past year.

What was it like to research urbanization on the Galápagos this summer? UChicago College website features our undergraduate student researchers in this great article. Partnering with Mapillary, the team captured street-level images to gather data on urbanization and sustainable development on the islands.

The project aims to map the whole world – eventually – and become a tool for better city planning as mayors decide which areas most need sewers, roads and other basics. Read more in this article by the Thomson Reuters Foundation.

The 2019 Global Sustainability Summer School is an intensive two-week program on urban sustainability and technological innovations driving global, sustainable development. Hosted at the Santa Fe Institute in partnership with the Mansueto Institute for Urban Innovation, the program provides an immersive experience for participants to explore interdisciplinary and forward-looking approaches to urban sustainability.

What’s the mathematical model behind our streets and neighborhoods? Is it possible to create the topology of a universally accessible city? Read more in Luis Bettencourt, Christa Breslford and Taylor Martin’s latest article in SIAM News, the journal for the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics.

Luis Bettencourt was appointed this year’s mentor for the On Cities Workshop organized by the Norman Foster Foundation in Madrid, Spain, held May 27 – 31, 2019. The Foundation hosted the On Cities Public Debates, chaired by Luis Bettencourt, where speakers from architecture and urban planning discussed issues surrounding informal settlements in urban contexts and the possibilities for transformation offered by technological innovation.

Nearly a century ago, Robert E. Park and Ernest Burgess co-authored what was to become a seminal text for the Chicago school of sociology. The City cemented both scholars as pioneers in the field and formalized a methodological, data-driven approach that has shaped the study of cities across space and time. Learn more about its impact on contemporary scholars and continuing relevance in a rapidly urbanizing world.