News

We are pleased to start a new project titled "Missing Pieces of the Puzzle" this summer with Jacob Faber, Kate Thomas, and Thomas Storrs. With support from the Russell Sage Foundation, this project will digitize loan and map documents created by the Federal Housing Administration and the Veteran's association detailing lending patterns and motivating factors. We will then analyse the impacts of these activities on racial inequality in neighborhood attainment, wealth building, and houisng opportunity.

Thanks to the generous support from the Center for Cities, we are happy to annouce the creation of new Urban Data Hub initiative at the College of Architecture, Art, and Planning! This is initiative is led by Wenfei Xu, director of the Urban Data Research Lab, Timur Dogan, director of the Environmental Systems Lab, and Jesse LeCavalier, director of the Master of Science, Advanced Urban Design Program at Cornell.

The Cornell AAP Urban Data Hub is a cross-disciplinary initiative aimed to catalyze longer-term urban big data infrastructure within AAP to accelerate our research, teaching, and engagement with contemporary and critical discourse in design and planning practice. Simultaneously, the Urban Data Hub will support the heretofore understudied and under-validated application of urban big data - particularly human mobility data described by cell phone locations - toward planning and design decisions in practice.

This new collaboration with Professor Fan Zhang at Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, as part of Cornell Global Hubs, aims to uncover urban renewal areas in the United States during the mid-20th century.

There is sparse research that systematically investigates Urban Renewal programs at a national level in the United States. A crucial reason is the lack of detailed, neighborhood-level data on the sites of urban renewal. Using a combination of archival records from the Housing and Home Finance Agency (HHFA) and the Urban Renewal Administration (URA), partially digitized maps records from the Digital Scholarship Lab (DSL), and aerial imagery from Delaware Valley Regional Planning Commission (DVRPC), this demonstration project will begin to create a national dataset of urban renewal sites and estimate the impact of urban renewal on the socioeconomic, racial, and housing outcomes on neighborhoods around the area.

We are excited to announce a grant from the Cornell Center for Social Sciences to continue our project, "A New Picture of Segregation".
This phase of our ongoing research project on location data expands on existing research to develop a nationwide understanding of the dynamic nature of racial and ethnic segregation in the United States using GPS data from mobile phone applications (MPA). The long-term aim of this research is to shed empirical light on a central claim in contemporary affordable housing policy in the United States, that the deconcentration of poverty at the neighborhood level leads to opportunities for social interaction and mobility, given that the mechanism linking a diversity of residential context to realized diverse social exposure and interaction has not been clarified