Join our team! Seeking a full-time Program Manager & Administrator
Have a passion for urban issues? Looking to join a dynamic team that catalyzes research on, in, and with cities? Apply to be our Program Manager & Administrator! We are looking for a talented candidate to coordinate and execute core IOC programs that support the BU faculty and student community and... More
Rip Off or Reasonable? Cities & Corporate Financial Incentives
Businesses are potentially more mobile today than ever before and have a wide range of options on where to locate. Cities and state try hard to attract investment; as in the competition for Amazon’s HQ2, they often promise significant sums in tax rebates, subsidies and services. On Friday, October 18th, the... More
Faculty Friday: Stephanie Curenton
Stephanie Curenton, Ph.D. is a tenured associate professor in the Boston University Wheelock College of Education & Human Development and the Director of the Ecology of School Readiness Lab. She studies the social, cognitive, and language development of low-income and minority children within various ecological contexts, such as parent-child interactions, early... More
Keeping A Good Thing Going: Sustaining Economic Growth in Our Cities
Keeping A Good Thing Going: Sustaining Economic Growth in Our Cities By: Carly Berke On Wednesday, October 2nd, the Initiative on Cities welcomed Alan Harding, the Chief Economic Adviser to the Mayor of Metropolitan Manchester, and Midori Morikawa, Director of Business Strategy for the City of Boston, to discuss sustaining economic growth... More
Women’s Political Empowerment A Century After the 19th Amendment: Reflections by Women Mayors
By: Carly Berke The 19th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, ratified exactly 100 years ago, is one of the most important victories in the history of women’s rights, given it confirmed that “the right to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on... More
New! Working Paper Series & Faculty Affiliate Program
The Initiative on Cities is pleased to announce two new opportunities for the BU community launching this Fall 2019: IOC Working Paper Series To help publicize and promote academic research on cities or urban populations, the Initiative is launching a Working Paper Series. This online repository of papers will help increase the... More
The Sounds of Boston and Beyond: The Sonic Dimension of Cities
By: Carly Berke On Tuesday, September 10th, the Initiative on Cities hosted "The Sounds of Boston and Beyond," a seminar exploring the development of urban soundscapes and their impact on public health and community engagement. Erica Walker, Founder of Noise and the City and the Community Noise Lab at Boston University, Daniel... More
Natalia Chavez: My Summer with the Mayor’s Office of New Urban Mechanics
Mitigating Displacement for Small Businesses and Nonprofits By Natalia Chavez Innovation is not usually associated with government. Government has been thought to be uncreative, inefficient, and overly bureaucratic, and in many instances, I’ve seen this to be true. So when I saw there was a summer fellowship at the Boston Mayor’s Office... More
BU Today Feature: “Vanguards in Urban Planning: Transforming Vancouver, Toronto, and Minneapolis”
"Minneapolis’ requirement that multifamily housing be permitted in all residential areas struck an overdue blow against racism in housing policy—and sets a model for other cities, a Minneapolis planner told Bostonians Monday at a forum at CitySpace, the public affairs venue of WBUR, BU’s National Public Radio station. 'We have a... More
Professor Tony Janetos, 1954-2019
It is with great sorrow that we learned that Professor Tony Janetos passed away on August 6th after battling pancreatic cancer. Tony has given extraordinary service to the University in his leadership of the Pardee Center, the Department of Earth and Environment, and BU’s Climate Action Plan. His impact on the... More
Speaker John Bercow Visits BU Initiative on Cities
On May 29, 2019, the Boston University Initiative on Cities was honored to welcome the Speaker of the UK House of Commons, John Bercow, as part of a series of visits by major public figures. Students from IOC Director Professor Graham Wilson’s British Politics class and members of the BU... More
A Conversation about Cities and Health
On Tuesday June 4th, IOC Co-Director Katharine Lusk spoke on a panel co-hosted by the Boston University School of Public Health, Initiative on Cities, AcademyHealth, and de Beaumont Foundation. Hosted by Sandro Galea, Dean of the School of Public Health, and moderated by Lisa Simpson, the President and CEO of... More
Summer Fellow Interview: Tori Amy Douglas
Tori is a rising senior at Boston University majoring in Political Science and minoring in Philosophy. She has previously worked for the WaterFront Center in New York, where she worked with children to teach the importance of environmental conservation. She interned at Environment America, where she worked on a campaign... More
Just Released: Mayors and the Health of Cities
Today, the Boston University Initiative on Cities, with support from Citi and the Rockefeller Foundation, launched Mayors and the Health of Cities, a new report that sheds light on how US mayors perceive and prioritize the health of their cities in the context of existing urban health data. The report... More
Diffusion of Public-Private Innovations: Conditions for Scaling Up Smart City Projects
On May 28th, the Initiative on Cities welcomed Lasse Bundgaard, a Visiting Researcher from the Copenhagen Business School and Copenhagen Solutions Lab, to discuss his research on Smart City Solutions and public-private partnerships. He presented the results from his paper with Susana Borras, “Diffusion of Public-Private Innovations: Conditions for Scaling Up... More
Summer Fellow Interview: Kevin Flakes
By: Doruntina Zeneli Kevin is currently pursuing a master’s in Urban Affairs with a specialization in urban inequalities and capacity building. Before entering the program, he consulted for banking clients, focusing on projects to mitigate risk, eliminate inefficiencies, and improve customer experience. Kevin graduated from the University of Massachusetts, Dartmouth, with... More
Meet Natalia Chavez, 2019 Mayor’s Office of New Urban Mechanics Fellow
By: Doruntina Zeneli Natalia Chavez is the Communications and Outreach Director at Urbanability, a Boston-based non-profit organization that focuses on empowering underserved communities from an urban planning perspective. She recently worked at the Harvard Ash Center for Democratic Governance and Innovation, where she worked on democracy programming and the legislative negotiation... More
Understanding Open-Air Drug Markets Configuration
Principal Investigator This project will explore the development of open-air drug markets in Colombia, where actors in the drug trade exert territorial control over central areas within cities. Specifically, Andrea Beltran Lizarazo will study the case of San Bernardo, in downtown Bogota, to understand what mechanisms benefited drug trade expansion and... More
Urban Policing and Racial Health Inequities
Principal Investigator Co-Principal Investigator The United States is characterized by inequities that are particularly striking with regard to race. While there are many studies documenting factors associated with racial inequities in health and that policing may be associated with worse mental health and well-being, there are few causal studies of policies that... More
2019 Early Stage Urban Research Award Recipients
In Spring 2019, the Initiative on Cities issued its fifth Request for Proposals to support early stage academic research endeavors focused on urban challenges and urban populations, both domestic and global. We received applications from 15 schools and departments at BU and and we are thrilled to announce we have... More