December 1, 2023

The Mansueto Institute for Urban Innovation and the Data Science Institute are launching the Local Data Journalism Initiative, to establish partnerships between news organizations and university-led data science teams to conduct ambitious investigative journalism on issues affecting cities, using the highest caliber data science and artificial intelligence tools and methodologies. The initiative comes at a moment when many newsrooms are strapped for resources and staff just as investigative journalism increasingly involves digging into large data sets with granular detail on topics such as housing and real estate, policing and crime, voting and elections, education, climate, and government finance. Journalists and University of Chicago students studying data science can now apply to be part of the inaugural Summer 2024 cohort.

November 17, 2023

Mansueto Institute director Christopher Berry is featured on a WBBM News Radio panel about the state of urban downtowns and the fear they’ll have trouble coming back from rising office and retail vacancies. Despite concerns about drawing people back to downtown areas when hybrid work appears here to stay, Berry noted that technological change, such as the inventions of the telephone and internet, led to predictions about the demise of cities in the past that didn’t come true. “There are strong reasons that have been around for a long time that people like concentrating in downtown areas and agglomerating, and those fundamental reasons aren’t changing.” Berry recommends rather than focus on “ what [a city was] supposed to be 20 years ago,” we look forward to “the next phase of downtown.”

November 9, 2023

Faculty director Christopher Berry says the timing of a proposed real estate transfer tax on property sales of over $1 million in Chicago “could not be worse for commercial real estate.” But it’s purpose, to address homelessness in the city, “could not be more urgent.” Berry commented to Axios Chicago, BisNow, and CoStar about Bring Chicago Home, which will be put to voters as a ballot measure in March. What some have called a “mansion tax” will actually come more from commercial property and multi-family buildings, during what is an especially precarious time for commercial real estate, according to Berry. But if the plan, which he said needs more details, were able to reduce the homeless population, it could make Chicago a national model, and benefit commercial owners in the long run because of the quality of life improvement.

November 8, 2023

Sabina Shaikh, senior instructional professor at the University of Chicago Committee on Environment, Geography and Urbanization, and a member of the Mansueto Institute faculty advisory council and faculty co-leader of the Environmental Frontiers Initiative, spoke with WBEZ Chicago’s The Rundown about urbanization, climate change, & balancing individual action with making cultural and systemic change. Shaikh points out that while cities contribute to the problem of climate change, there is also a lot of opportunities for collective transformation, around systems for waste, water, and energy, that could make a significant difference in reducing human impact on the planet. (Image: Northerly Island Park in Chicago, the site of a former airport field that was converted to a lakefront nature preserve and recreational area, Credit: Eric Allix Rogers).

November 7, 2023

The Chicago Neighborhood Project, led by Professor Emily Talen of the University of Chicago, is inviting all Chicago residents to redefine their neighborhoods by filling out a three-minute survey that asks Chicagoans to draw their neighborhood’s boundaries. The survey, which was covered in Block Club Chicago, aims to align official definitions with the way the real experts — the Chicago residents who travel in and around the city every day — truly perceive and live in their neighborhoods. By completing this quick survey, you can enter for a chance to win a $50 gift card. It is available in multiple languages at chicago-neighborhoods.com, and was funded by a Mansueto Institute Urban Innovation Grant.

November 7, 2023

In a Chicago Tribune op-ed, director & Harris School of Public Policy prof. Christopher Berry says that voting districts for upcoming school board elections must be drawn to represent all voters, rather than just the student demographics of Chicago Public Schools, arguing that representation should adhere to the democratic principle of one person, one vote. For those interested in replicating the analysis in this article, access the code on the Github repository.

October 30, 2023

Christopher Berry, director of the Mansueto Institute, and William J. and Alicia Townsend Friedman Professor at the Harris School for Public Policy, was inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, one of the country’s oldest and most prestigious honorary societies. The new class was announced in 2022, and officially inducted last month. Berry is among a class of 261 individuals, which also includes Esteban Rossi-Hansberg, a faculty advisory council member to the Mansueto Institute and professor in the Kenneith D. Griffin Department of Economics and Becker Friedman Institute.

October 30, 2023

A new discussion paper published in an IZA Institute of Labor Economics series by Institute postdoctoral fellow Arianna Salazar-Miranda, with colleague Albert Saiz of MIT and IZA, “Understanding Urban Economies, Land Use, and Social Dynamics in the City: Big Data and Measurement,” explores how a wide range of big data sources, from GPS to street imagery to social media to real estate transactions, are used in urban science and urban economics. The goal is to provide guidance for future research while highlighting data collection and analysis challenges.

October 10, 2023

In the magazine Tax Notes (paywalled), former Federal Reserve of Boston economist Robert Tannenwald reviews a study by Christopher R. Berry, director of the Mansueto Institute, that found property tax assessors nationwide tend to underestimate the market values of expensive homes and overestimate those of inexpensive ones. Tannenwald discusses the article in the context of a long-standing debate among economists over whether property taxes are regressive, describing an investigation Berry led which found regressivity in Cook County’s property tax assessments and led to a larger study finding the issue in counties across the United States. After examining common reasons for regressive property tax assessment, Berry recommends “using more timely, detailed data and refinements in assessment models,” as Tannenwald summarizes. He adds of Berry’s research: “It is a first-rate study that takes full advantage of the rapidly expanding volume of data and computational capacity available to social scientists.”

October 5, 2023

According to an analysis prepared for Crain’s Chicago Business by the Mansueto Institute and the Center for Municipal Finance at the Harris School for Public Policy, the average Chicago homeowner’s property tax bill could increase hundreds of dollars a year while office tower owners pay less because the value of their property has declined. “Everyone will have to pay if downtown takes a hit,” said Christopher Berry, director of the Mansueto Institute, who led the study. “It wouldn’t be a back-breaking increase for residential property owners, but people would feel it for sure.” The analysis looked at what homeowners would pay in taxes, depending on how much the value of downtown offices and other commercial property declined.

September 27, 2023

Julia Koschinsky, executive director of the Center for Spatial Data Science; Nicholas Marchio, research data scientist at the Mansueto Institute; and Nikhil Patel, a University of Chicago undergraduate and summer lab research assistant at the Data Science Institute, developed an AP Statistics lesson with the education non-profit Skew the Script, which provides engaging math lessons to more than 20,000 educators nationally. They produced lesson plans customized to 100 different U.S. cities on concepts related to spatial random sampling with data and maps teachers can use for their own cities. The program was created by an AP Stats teacher in San Antonio, who scrapped the traditional curriculum and made lessons on relevant topics to students, like gerrymandering, medicine, online dating, and sports. That year, more students at the school took and passed the AP Exam than in the previous 16 years combined.

September 15, 2023

A short documentary by the organization Strong Towns spotlights the United States’ regressive property tax system, which results in lower and middle-income homeowners paying a greater share of taxes than upper-income homeowners. This can push people to sell their homes, or result in foreclosure, destabilizing families and communities, and eating away at generational wealth. The piece includes an extensive interview with Christopher R. Berry, Director of the Mansueto Institute for Urban Innovation at the University of Chicago and William J. and Alicia Townsend Friedman Professor at Harris School of Public Policy. Berry describes the Property Tax Project, an effort by Harris’s Center for Municipal Finance which allows homeowners to review records of sales of homes in any county across the country. “People can lose their homes for failing to pay what are, often unfair taxes,” Berry says. He notes however that some counties, including Illinois’ Cook County, are starting to make reforms, and he encourages other jurisdictions to look at these examples. “I’m very optimistic that five years from now, the way the assessment community as a whole thinks about this problem will have changed,” Berry added.

August 16, 2023

Research by the Center for Municipal Finance under Mansueto Institute director Christopher R. Berry and colleagues, has paved the way for a new law that was signed this week by Illinois governor J.B. Pritzker. The research by Berry and colleagues at the Center for Municipal Finance found that Cook County’s Scavenger Sale system had inequitable results. Now, the state is poised to reform it and unfair property tax codes across Illinois. Berry and CMF’s work into scavenger sales, which take place if a homeowner has accumulated years of unpaid property taxes, was supported by The Chicago Community Trust and Cook County Land Bank Authority . “What our work did was allow us to take an evidence-based perspective and show that it wasn’t just anecdotes or observations that indicated the system wasn’t working,” Berry said.

August 9, 2023

Cities in premodern Mesoamerica survived and thrived for centuries despite many natural and social changes. A new paper, published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences by Mansueto Institute and Department of Anthropology postdoctoral fellow Adrian S.Z. Chase and colleagues across the country and in Guatemala and Mexico, encourages us to understand how the diversity of these cities contributed to their resilience and adaptation. Chase also discusses his work mixing archaeology and modern urban studies in a podcast interview with The Tel, “Mapping Ancient Maya Cities,” focusing on his work at the Mansueto Institute.

August 5, 2023

A Toronto Star investigation with consulting from Christopher R. Berry, Director of the Mansueto Institute, found that cheaper homes in Toronto are often assessed at higher values than their sales price, while expensive homes are frequently assessed at lower values. Berry, who is also William J. and Alicia Townsend Friedman Professor and Faculty Affiliate at the Center for Municipal Finance at The University of Chicago Harris School of Public Policy and the College, reviewed a dataset gathered by the Star of close to 12,000 properties, and also commented in follow-up articles about the work. Working with colleagues at CMF, Berry has done extensive study of the assessment industry to reveal stark inequities in the way property tax is assessed in the United States. This is the first time his work has been applied to properties in Canada.

August 1, 2023

The Mansueto Institute has awarded Urban Innovation Grants to three teams at the University of Chicago for research projects focused on advancing more sustainable and equitable urban futures. The awardees represent multiple disciplines and academic units at the university in public health, sociology, and urban planning, and include research into traffic safety for children; urbanization, energy, and environmental sustainability; and how residents define Chicago’s neighborhoods.

July 20, 2023

The Mansueto Institute for Urban Innovation is excited to announce that Christopher R. Berry, the William J. and Alicia Townsend Friedman Professor at the Harris School of Public Policy and in the College, has been appointed faculty director of the Institute, effective immediately. Berry founded and currently serves as director of the University of Chicago’s Center for Municipal Finance and focuses on American politics, metropolitan governance, municipal finance, and intergovernmental fiscal relations.

May 31, 2023

Christopher Esposito, Institute & Knowledge Lab Postdoctoral Fellow, will join the Price Center at the UCLA Anderson School of Management this fall as a postdoctoral scholar to extend his research on innovation and cities and to build a new research direction on entrepreneurship. Chris researches technological disruption and its impacts on inventors, teams, and cities. His current research uses large historical datasets to study how the rate of technological disruption changed across U.S. history.

May 31, 2023

Alexandra Ciomek, Institute Postdoctoral Fellow & Crown Family School of Social Work, Policy, and Practice Postdoctoral Scholar, will join Nuffield College at the Oxford University this fall as a Postdoctoral Fellow with Dr. David Kirk in the Department of Sociology. Ciomek will continue her work studying the spatialized network aspects of urban crime and will begin working with Dr. Kirk on the life course impact of gun violence exposure, using data from the Project on Human Development in Chicago Neighborhoods (PHDCN).

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.

May 31, 2023

Alexandra Ciomek, Institute Postdoctoral Fellow & Crown Family School of Social Work, Policy, and Practice Postdoctoral Scholar, will join Nuffield College at the Oxford University this fall as a Postdoctoral Fellow with Dr. David Kirk in the Department of Sociology. Ciomek will continue her work studying the spatialized network aspects of urban crime and will begin working with Dr. Kirk on the life course impact of gun violence exposure, using data from the Project on Human Development in Chicago Neighborhoods (PHDCN).

May 31, 2023

Christopher Esposito, Institute & Knowledge Lab Postdoctoral Fellow, will join the Price Center at the UCLA Anderson School of Management this fall as a postdoctoral scholar to extend his research on innovation and cities and to build a new research direction on entrepreneurship. Chris researches technological disruption and its impacts on inventors, teams, and cities. His current research uses large historical datasets to study how the rate of technological disruption changed across U.S. history.

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.

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.

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 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.

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.

Watch researcher Marc Berman interview with Fox32 about the new study from Andrew Stier, Berman, and Luis Bettencourt about rates of depression in urban areas. Berman discusses the new revelations about lower rates of depression in cities due to dense social networks and rich potential for human interaction. He also talks about their brand-new model for examining mental health within an urban framework.

A new article from The Times London features the recent study from Andrew Stier, Marc Berman, and Luis Bettencourt about lower rates of depression in cities. Researchers discovered that increasing a city population by 100 percent yields only an 85 percent increase in cases of depression. This discrepancy is most likely caused by the rich networks and potential for social interaction in dense, urban environments like cities. Read more here.

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.