Urban issues are interdisciplinary. NYU's urban experts and researchers come together from different schools, disciplines, and perspectives to form working groups that unite around various issues, themes, and approaches. Here is their work.

The Research Alliance
for New York City Schools

The Research Alliance conducts rigorous studies on topics that matter to the City’s public schools. We strive to advance equity and excellence in education by providing nonpartisan evidence about policies and practices that promote students' development and academic success.

The Research Alliance fulfills three core functions:

  • Conducting rigorous, applied research in collaboration with policymakers, educators, and other stakeholders;
  • Maintaining a unique archive of longitudinal data on NYC schools and communities, to support ongoing research; and
  • Communicating the results of our work to a variety of audiences here in NYC and around the nation.
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Urban Greening Lab Initiative

Urban ecology has emerged at the cutting edge of comprehensive, effective environmental research approaches in cities. By combining an ecosystem ecology-based approach to urban environmental systems with complex social analyses, urban ecology allows researchers from multiple disciplines to address a common set of research questions. The most effective urban ecology research projects are by definition collaborative; they demand interdisciplinary teams whose members contribute expertise and data from multiple disciplinary perspectives.

Conceptual mission: We aim to investigate the coproduction of environmental and social change through an urban ecology research design that integrates biophysical, social, and design studies inquiry. This includes all phases of research: from conceptualization, to operationalization, to analysis.

Intellectual goal: We seek to understand the flows and fluxes between biophysical and social processes as they operate in case-based approaches.

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Engaged Urbanists

Engaged Urbanists is the Urban Democracy Lab's longest-standing, core working group. It meets monthly on the second Monday of each month and is built on reviewing works-in-progress that emphasize the porousness of the walls between the academy and the "real" world, scholars and activists, teachers and learners.

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