Catalyzing a Cross-Disciplinary, Cross-University Urban Research Agenda in the Age of Digital Data

Harvard University, Cambridge MA

Investigators

Abstract

The Boston Area Research Initiative (BARI), a new entity based at Harvard's Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, proposes to catalyze and pursue a cross-disciplinary, cross-institutional urban research agenda that capitalizes on the data opportunity presented by the ongoing digital revolution. The proposed project will be organized around three main activities, each supported by BARI's rich network of data holders and users at Boston-area universities, public-sector agencies and private companies: 1) The identification and procurement of data that describe the people and places of the greater Boston area. 2) The support of original collaborative research by members of the BARI network that utilizes next-generation data in conjunction with traditional data sources and new methodologies. 3) The construction of a prototype Data Library that archives and catalogs both the data supporting the current research agenda, and the secondary data sets that emerge from their analysis, enabling future work and teaching applications to build off these initial projects. Intellectual Merit In recent years, many public and private institutions in cities have begun collecting administrative data from high to adequate quality, ranging from real-time descriptors of neighborhood conditions, to communication between individuals and movement between neighborhoods, to patterns in the education, health, and economic sectors. These next-generation data collectively provide a basis to create a comprehensive picture of human behavior in cities that has the potential to transform theoretical models of urban governance and behavior throughout the social, behavioral and economic sciences. BARI seeks to stimulate an urban research agenda that utilizes these data with a focus on three crosscutting themes: 1) Stability and change in neighborhoods, especially the social processes by which neighborhoods and their residents reciprocally shape each other across time. 2) The social structure of the city, or how interpersonal, attitudinal, and institutional relationships that cut across neighborhoods create an interlocking set of structures that potentially influence resource allocation and the way that neighborhoods operate. 3) Cognition and context, specifically how cognitive mechanisms and cultural narratives can drive behavior in urban neighborhoods, and the consequences those behaviors have for both the characteristics of a given neighborhood and its relationships with other neighborhoods. The proposed agenda will be undertaken by BARI's leadership team, a set of experienced urban scholars at Harvard and Northeastern Universities, and the broader BARI network, which has over 100 members including faculty from ten Boston-area universities and experts from a range of government agencies and private companies. The project will also collaborate with initiatives in other cities, such as Chicago, and is designed to yield generalizable knowledge and portable methodological strategies. Broader Impacts The scholarly works that emerge from this project will contribute to the development of a computational social science that utilizes the rich content of next-generation data. Resulting insights will also provide the basis for teaching and policy innovations, with the translation from research to practice enhanced by BARI's already strong ties with the public sector. Finally, the efforts and products from the proposed project will pave the way for similar work in other cities and contribute to a comparative urban science.