The Boston University Initiative on Cities (IOC) is proud to share our 2025 Annual Report, marking 11 years of impact. This past year, we deepened our role as an interdisciplinary hub for urbanists — bridging research and practice, leading place-based experiential learning programs, and expanding connections with partners locally, nationally, and globally. Together, these efforts advance our mission to foster more livable and resilient cities.
Highlights from the past year include:
People
- Director Loretta Lees received two prestigious honors: the Contribution to the Field of Urban Affairs Award from the Urban Affairs Association and the E. Willard and Ruby S. Miller Award from the American Association of Geographers.
- External Advisory Board member Dominic Moulden was awarded an Honorary Doctor of Humane Letters at BU’s 2025 Commencement for his lifelong work as a community organizer, educator, and photographer.
- Associate Director of Heat Dan Li secured three new federal grants to advance his research on multiscale modeling of extreme heat in cities and was awarded the Helmut E. Landsberg Award in August by the American Meteorological Society for his foundational contributions to understanding how urbanization interacts with the climate system.
- We welcomed Dr. Pinar Çobanyilmaz as a Visiting Fulbright Scholar, whose research focuses on urban and rural climate resiliency measures and management after forest fires.
Research
- The Initiative co-launched the Global Alliance on Sustainable Urban Societies with the Urban Institute, Singapore Management University; the School of Cities, University of Toronto; University of Melbourne Centre for Cities; and the London School of Economics. This five-country partnership will pursue interdisciplinary research that views cities through a human-centered lens.
- In Louisville, KY, Director Lees, with former IOC Postdoctoral Research Associate Kenton Card (now University of Minnesota Center for Urban and Regional Affairs) and Andre Comandon (Research Scientist, METRANS Transportation Consortium, University of Southern California) developed the first Anti-Displacement Assessment Tool voted into law by a U.S. city, garnering international attention and interest. The tool assesses the predicted impact of new subsidized residential developments on neighborhoods.
- Through our Early Stage Urban Research Awards, we catalyzed $16.5 million in total funding since 2015, including $2.8 million reported in 2024. In 2025, we awarded three $10,000 Early Stage Urban Research Awards to projects working at the intersections of urban heat, health, and housing.
- We co-authored The Boston Foundation’s 2024 Greater Boston Housing Report Card and a policy brief for Community Solutions on The Role of Sanitation and Waste Management in Local Responses to Homelessness.
- Locally, we undertook two new Boston-based research projects examining the links between gentrification and schools, as well as the impacts of short-term rental regulations.
Learning
- Through our MetroBridge program, we supported experiential learning with municipal and community partners for 293 BU undergraduate and graduate students in 14 classes spanning 17 projects. For the first time, the program partnered with faculty from Boston University’s School of Law (LAW).
- Our summer fellowship and internship program continued to be a staple of connecting BU students with local governments. This year, graduate and undergraduate students spent their summer in Boston City Hall, working with the Mayor’s Office of New Urban Mechanics, the Equity and Inclusion Cabinet, Office of Climate Resilience, and a new undergraduate internship with the Planning Advisory Council in the City of Boston’s Planning Department.
- Matt Lutkins (CAS ‘25), a sociology and economics major, received the 2025 Initiative on Cities Student Prize. This year, 16 students graduated with a minor in Urban Studies, bringing the total number of BU graduates with the minor to 53 since the minor’s launch.
- We continued our long-running Urban Inequalities Workshop in partnership with the Department of Sociology, inviting seven faculty members, graduate students, and postdoctoral scholars from within and outside BU to share their current research in progress.
Practice
- The IOC hosted 28 events and critical conversations on campus and beyond. Highlights include our four-day 2025 Public Impact Scholars program, which brought together 20 BU scholars from 13 academic departments with 27 speakers spanning policymakers, practitioners, and institutes to connect academic research to policy. We also convened a full-day book symposium on gentrification in U.S. cities, featuring leading scholars in the field of gentrification studies.
- We continued our partnership with Metropolitan College’s City Planning & Urban Affairs program on the Transportation & the City series, which this year featured three former Massachusetts Secretaries of Transportation, two (Fred Salvucci and Jim Aloisi) at our Allston Multimodal Project event, and one (Jamey Tesler) as a speaker for our Accelerating Change in the Mobility Sector event.
- We hosted Jerusalem Demsas, Editor-in-Chief of The Argument, for a discussion on her new book, On the Housing Crisis: Land, Development, Democracy, based on her coverage of the housing crisis in the United States.