Exploring the West End Museum Archives
Students in the CAS Engineering Boston class explored the West End Museum archives March 18, with the aim of using documents, photos, magazines, and maps to construct a curriculum about urban renewal in Boston. While the archives are digitized, CAS History Professor Betty Anderson brings her students, among them Mona Zhang (CAS’29) (left) and Yishan He (CAS’28), to the museum for the tactile experience of exploring documents, photos, magazines, and maps. Once they find an aspect of Boston’s West End to focus on, the students will work in teams to construct a curriculum about urban renewal in Boston.
Putting Media to Work for the People
On a warm September afternoon, two dozen people filled a BU conference room. Journalists, researchers, nonprofit staffers, a photographer, a pastor and an environmental analysis and policy student sat with professors of mass communication, renaissance art, anthropology, film studies, religion and romance studies.
Urban Refuge Wins Crowdfunding Award, Charts Next Phase
Urban Refuge originated in 2016 as a classroom project developed by students in the “Forced Migration Policy Incubator” course taught by Dr. Noora Lori, Associate Professor of International Relations and Director of the Middle East–North Africa (MENA) Initiative. Rather than writing traditional policy memos, students were challenged to envision digital tools that could directly support refugees. Collaborating remotely with six Syrian and Jordanian peers in Amman, Pardee students developed an app designed to “put aid on the map” through a geocoded, user‑friendly platform that helps refugees locate essential services such as education, health care, legal assistance, housing, employment, and cash aid.
How Transit Enriches a City
A student-focused fireside chat with Phil Eng, MBTA general manager and interim Massachusetts Secretary of Transportation, was held March 5 at the Kilachand Center. Panelists explored how public transit shapes urban lives and those who work, live in, or visit cities, with a focus on the Boston region and the MBTA. The event was hosted by BU’s Initiative on Cities, the Metropolitan College City Planning & Urban Affairs program, and the Urban Planning Association.
Boston University Hosts Fireside Chat on Public Transit’s Impact
Boston University recently hosted a student-focused fireside chat exploring how public transit enriches cities, with a focus on the Boston region and the MBTA. The event, held at the Kilachand Center, featured a panel discussion with Phil Eng, the MBTA general manager and interim Massachusetts Secretary of Transportation, and was organized by BU’s Initiative on Cities, the Metropolitan College City Planning & Urban Affairs program, and the Urban Planning Association.
Trust In The AI Age
As a community, the people most familiar with AI understand that trust will play a central role in consumer-facing applications, and that even beyond that, trust is, in so many ways, the currency of today’s digital environment. After the fairly stillborn launch of cryptocurrencies in the late aughts, AI has taken the world by storm. The benefits are evident. But so are the risks. The benefits are colossal, too. To the society, to individuals – but so are the risks.
Safe and Sheltered: How Tenant Organizers Protect Their Neighbors in Minneapolis
Taylor Kohn lives in the same Minneapolis neighborhood where ICU nurse Alex Pretti was murdered by Customs and Border Patrol (CBP) agents in January. But even aside from this high-profile killing, Kohn says that since CBP and Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) began occupying the city last December, every block has been written with one traumatic memory or another. On the route she takes to walk her dog every day “is where I hid when [the] feds were tear gassing us.” Farther down the street “is where I [think I] saw a teenager sobbing while they were put in an ICE vehicle,” she adds.
Fact Over Fiction: Medicaid, Immigration, and Health Care Access
In 2025, approximately 52 million immigrants lived in the United States, forming 16% of the population. Health insurance coverage is closely tied to immigration status – including Medicaid. Many groups of immigrants are categorically excluded from federally-funded health insurance programs. Undocumented immigrants, in particular, have long been prohibited from obtaining Medicaid. However, in the last year, inaccurate claims around Medicaid eligibility for immigrants have been used to justify policy changes proposed under the One Big Beautiful Bill Act (OBBBA). For example, one false claim was that undocumented immigrants were responsible for increased Medicaid spending. It is crucial to ground any discussions of policy proposals and their potential impacts in evidence.
Briefly Noted: “Cape Fever,” “A Very Cold Winter,” “Strangers,” and “The Death and Life of Gentrification.”
This wide-ranging study explores how the term “gentrification” has slipped the bonds of its original, “brick-and-mortar” usage, becoming a way to signal loss while addressing “structural inequalities and concomitant social changes.” As a metaphor, its meaning has become fluid; it is now commonplace to read of the “gentrification” of subjects as varied as music, the internet, sandwiches, and queer culture. Brown-Saracino also zeroes in on a crucial aspect of the term’s appeal: in an era of ideological land mines, “gentrification,” she writes, “is politically charged without evoking a specific, narrow political stance.”
How I Let Go of Gentrification
Today, talk of gentrification abounds and that talk is increasingly heterogeneous. On a field trip with my students, a tour guide used the term not to describe class turnover in post-industrial neighborhoods, but to gesture to a much longer history of population replacement. For him, gentrification conveyed a century of racialized displacement: from the replacement of Black populations by changing industrial uses, to urban renewal, and, finally, to present-day real-estate speculation. Used in this manner, gentrification encompasses the displacement of marginalized populations, regardless of form, decade, or origin. This example is just the tip of the iceberg. All kinds of people rely on gentrification to talk about transformations, many of them unrelated to cities. For instance, reporters refer to the gentrification of the churro and the gentrification of Burning Man. Here, gentrification denotes the upscaling of entities that aren’t neighborhoods; the churro has become more expensive and Burning Man has transmogrified into a festival-destination for the wealthy and celebrities.