Our Initiatives

Incubating Ideas at the Cutting Edge

 

We create and nurture initiatives from the most innovative urban scholars.

The Mansueto Institute provides a platform for researchers and scholars to incubate and anchor multidisciplinary initiatives. This includes support from a data scientist on staff, communications, and development. Each initiative affiliated with the Mansueto Institute is led by one or more faculty members.

We look for innovators across UChicago who are leading initiatives with the potential for local and global impact. Our initiatives share a commitment to the highest level of scholarship in the realms of science, the arts, humanistic inquiry, and practice. Initiatives are continually being sought and created towards incubating efforts that can grow and become self-sustaining.

Some initiatives focus primarily on scientific research and disciplinary frontiers, while others on learning and engagement. All initiatives share a comprehensive interdisciplinary approach to tackling the challenges and opportunities of cities.

University of Chicago faculty can learn more about applying for an Urban Innovations Grant, which have helped to seed many of our research initiatives.

Chicago Neighborhood Project

Chicago prides itself as “The City of Neighborhoods” but where are they? Chicago needs an update from the 77 community areas mapped in the 1920s. The purpose of the Chicago Neighborhood Project is to better understand — and support — Chicago’s neighborhoods. A short survey asks current Chicago residents to identify Chicago’s neighborhoods using an interactive map to draw their neighborhood boundaries. With over 4,500 responses, the survey will help to create a new map of Chicago by neighborhood, the average definition of which is around 5,000 people, rather than just the community area, which average about 35,000 people.  The Chicago Neighborhood Project is supported with an Urban Innovations Grant from the Mansueto Institute.

The Community Research on Climate and Urban Science (CROCUS) is a flagship project from the U.S. Department of Energy to create a network of Urban Integrated Field Laboratories for the study of climate change in local urban communities across the U.S. The project is led by Argonne National Laboratory with the University of Chicago and other higher education institutions in the greater Chicago area, as well as four community partners. The Mansueto Institute for Urban Innovation heads the University of Chicago’s affiliation with CROCUS.

Environmental Frontiers

Environmental Frontiers, a partnership with the Committee on Environment, Geography and Urbanization (CEGU), the Center for Robust Decision-making on Climate and Energy Policy (RDCEP), the Office of the Provost, and Facilities Services‘ Office of Sustainability, gives University of Chicago students a scientific and practical understanding of urban sustainable development, starting with projects on campus. Students work under the guidance of faculty to develop research and applied projects that explore and enhance campus sustainability, with an eye toward broader impact into whole urban areas and their neighborhoods.

The Kreisman Initiative for Housing Law and Policy brings together multiple fields of inquiry – including policy, social services, business, law, social and data sciences – to advance housing scholarship and generate new ideas about cities and housing. Partnering with the Urbanism Lab, led by Emily Talen, the Kreisman Initiative is the only effort at the University of Chicago dedicated to housing scholarship and practice, with the mission of bringing Chicago ideas to bear on housing policy debates, policy making, and legal and business decision making through scholarly research, external engagement, and educational programming. The Initiative includes a graduate fellowship program that accommodates as many as ten scholars each year, as well as a robust series of convenings, bringing together housing thought leaders from academia, policy and industry.

Local Data Journalism Initiative

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. Analyzing and presenting this information in a rigorous, engaging, and impactful way takes significant time, computational power, and expertise — at a moment when many newsrooms are strapped for resources and staff. Leveraging the University of Chicago’s robust data science infrastructure, the Local Data Journalism Initiative establishes 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 is run in partnership with the Data Science Institute and the Mansueto Institute.

The Million Neighborhoods initiative is a collaborative network of diverse organizations working locally in Chicago and in neighborhoods throughout the world towards more sustainable and equitable human development. The network builds a common framework, tools, and data for mapping, planning, and coordinating solutions towards fulfilling the UN’s Agenda 2030 for Global Sustainable Development.

Property Tax Fairness

The Property Tax Fairness project is a partnership between the Mansueto Institute and the Center for Municipal Finance at the Harris School of Public Policy presenting evaluations of property taxes in cities across the country. As the single largest source of local taxes for cities, counties, school districts, and special districts, totaling $500 billion per year, property taxes impact everyone. In many cities, however, property taxes are also inequitable: low-value properties face higher tax assessments, relative to their actual market values, than do high-value properties. This tax regressivity disproportionately burdens lower-income residents. To better understand these issues, the Property Tax Fairness project has reviewed millions of sales records for properties throughout the country. This site presents the results of these evaluations.

Trauma Interest Work Group

The Trauma Interest Work Group (TIWG), is a partnership with faculty from the Biological Sciences and Social Sciences Divisions that promotes the scientific, interdisciplinary understanding of trauma and works to improve equity and justice on the South Side of Chicago and beyond. TIWG does this through education, scholarship, clinical care, community engagement, and advocacy.​ TIWG pursues this vision by establishing a multidisciplinary dialogue and taking an ecological approach to the complexities of trauma at the individual, relational, community and institutional levels. By communicating and strategizing across disciplines—including clinical work, social work, public health policy, sociology, community advocacy, and more—TIWG advances a rigorous, scientific, and compassionate approach to the understanding, treatment, and prevention of trauma. TIWG regularly hosts speaker series on topics such as forced migration, community perspectives on safety, and gun violence.

Urban Cognition Lab

The Urban Cognition Lab investigates how the design of the physical environment affects an individual’s brain and behavior. Scientists develop experiments, methodologies, and instrumentation for discovering how people respond, physically and cognitively, to different kinds of places.  Their findings help spatial designers, policymakers, and planners build urban spaces that better foster human well-being and social life.

Past Initiatives

Array of Things

The Array of Things is a network of interactive, modular sensors that collect real-time data on a city’s environment, infrastructure, and activity for research and public use. The initiative enables anyone to access data about climate, air quality, noise, and other factors that affect the livability of our built and natural environments.

Urban Architecture and Design

Urban Architecture and Design seeks to transform how we envision the future of the built environment. The initiative brings together UChicago faculty and the world’s leading design practitioners to pursue research, programs, and pedagogy that face the challenge of today’s environmental, social, and economic imperatives.