2024 Greater Boston Housing Report Card
The Initiative on Cities Co-Authors the 2024 Greater Boston Housing Report Card Special Analysis on Using Public Land to Develop Affordable Housing Greater Boston’s well-publicized housing challenges continue, even as communities work to change zoning rules to comply with the state’s new MBTA Communities requirements. A lack of new construction, high interest rates, and changing […]
IOC Co-Authors New Commentary on Highway Reclamation Impacts on Population Health
Boston University Assistant Professor of Epidemiology and IOC BU Urbanist Mary Willis (SPH), alongside co-authors Fintan Mooney (SPH), Professor of Epidemiology Jennifer Weuve (SPH), IOC Director Loretta Lees (CAS), and IOC Executive Director Stacy Fox, contributed to a new commentary in the Journal of Urban Health that proposes a framework for evaluating the multidimensional impacts of […]
The Promises and Potential Pitfalls of Highway Reclamation for Population Health: A Research Framework
Highway reclamation (i.e., the removal of highways or placing existing highways underground to create mixed-use urban areas) is being implemented around the United States, often touting co-benefits for population health. As part of the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law and the Inflation Reduction Act, the Reconnecting Communities and Neighborhoods grant program is a first-of-its-kind investment in launching even more highway reclamation projects. This commentary proposes a framework by which the multidimensional impacts of highway reclamation can be evaluated, unlocking potential new structural pathways toward urban health equity.
Initiative on Cities Releases 2024 Annual Report
The Boston University Initiative on Cities (IOC) is proud to release its 2024 Annual Report — marking 10 years since our founding and commitment to the betterment of cities. The achievements over the past year underscore our center’s dedication to serving as an interdisciplinary hub for urbanists, bridging research and practice, and leading place-based experiential […]
New Publication: “Operationalizing climate justice in the implementation of Boston’s Building Performance Standard”
Dr. Claudia Diezmartínez, Professor Benjamin Sovacool, and Associate Professor Anne Short Gianotti have published a new paper on Nature Cities that analyzes the politics and processes of implementing climate justice plans in urban governments. Read the full abstract here: “Cities are moving toward the implementation of more just urban climate actions, but the politics and […]
Policy Brief: The Role of Sanitation and Waste Management in Local Responses to Homelessness
Authors: Katherine Levine Einstein (Associate Professor of Political Science, Boston University), Charley E. Willison (Assistant Professor of Public and Ecosystem Health, Cornell University) In this brief, the Boston University Initiative on Cities, Cornell University, and Community Solutions investigate the involvement of sanitation agencies in response to homelessness in cities across the country. Unsheltered homelessness is highly visible and presents social, […]
American History: Boston, Massachusetts
Boston has been an influential city in the development of the United States for more than four hundred years. By the early 21st century, Boston, led by Massachusetts Institute of Technology faculty and graduates, became a global center for technological innovation and the leading center for life sciences. In the meantime, Boston has become one of the most economically unequal cities in the country, with large numbers of well-compensated professionals and technologists and a larger number of lower-income service workers.
Book Review: Des Fitzgerald, The City of Today is a Dying Thing: In Search of the Cities of Tomorrow
I read Des Fitzgerald’s The City of Today is a Dying Thing one bitterly cold Sunday in one sitting, looking out of the expansive windows of my new-build apartment in Boston with views of the cityscape revealing old and new green planning and development ideas. I liked that I could read the book quickly because the book is a catholic but speedy foray through city and urban planning ideas that have tackled anxieties about the city, especially around mental health, ideas that have bled through into contemporary notions of greening cities.
Planetary Gentrification and Urban Authoritarianism
The task of theorization is to generalize, but we need to continue to question the ways in which we generalize and from where we generalize. We need to be reflexive about what we might mean by ‘authoritarian’ and not assume that supposedly democratic Euro-America does not enact authoritarian practices or that supposedly authoritarian states always do.
Association between Combined Sewer Overflow Events and Gastrointestinal Illness in Massachusetts Municipalities with and without River-Sourced Drinking Water, 2014–2019
A new study has found an increased risk of acute gastrointestinal illness during the four-day period following large-volume combined sewer overflows (CSO) among downstream communities bordering the Merrimack River.