The Urban Portal

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American Hometowns

USA.Gov
Visit America's cities, counties, towns, and communities online by searching a state wide directory.  American Hometowns contains detailed directories of city and county home websites and data in all 50 States.   

Filed under: Data

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American Human Development Project

Social Science Research Council
The American Human Development Project provides easy-to-use yet methodologically sound tools for understanding the distribution of well-being and opportunity in America and stimulating fact-based dialogue about issues we all care about: health, education, and living standards.

AHDP produces national and state reports, as well as thematic briefs and innovative online tools such as the Mapping of the Measure of America, which also includes the City Explorer and Charts

Filed under: Links

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Announcing the 2013 Urban Forums

Between 26 April and 11 May 2013, the Network will host four conferences on the University of Chicago campus in Hyde Park to discuss the built environment, globailization and mobility, political networks and health in cities.

November 29, 2012

Filed under: Issues

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Are Promise Neighborhoods worth the cost?

In May 2010, President Barack Obama announced a request for $210 million in federal funding for the Promise Neighborhoods Program, an effort to replicate the Harlem Children’s Zone (HCZ) model in twenty cities across the United States.

March 01, 2011

Filed under: Issues

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Assisted Housing: National and Local

U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD)
Picture of Subsidized Households describes the households living in HUD-subsidized housing in the United States for the year providing data from the 1970s through 2008. There is information describing the characteristics of assisted housing units and residents, summarized at various levels, including: national, state, public housing agency (PHA), project, census tract, county, Core-Based Statistical Area and city levels.

Filed under: Data

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Black Metropolis Research Consortium

Columbia College, Chicago Public Library, Chicago History Museum, Chicago State University, DePaul University, Dominican University, DuSable Museum of African American History, Illinois Institute of Technology, Kennedy King College, Loyola University, Roosevelt University, Northwestern University, University of Illinois Chicago, University of Chicago
The Black Metropolis Research Consortium (BMRC) is an unincorporated Chicago-based association of libraries, universities, and other archival institutions with major holdings of materials that document African American and African diasporic culture, history, and politics, with a specific focus on materials relating to Chicago. The University of Chicago serves as Host Institution of the BMRC.
The BMRC is dedicated to making broadly accessible its members' holdings of materials that document African American and African diasporic culture, history, and politics, with a specific focus on materials relating to Chicago.

Filed under: Organizations

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Building Resilient Regions

The University of California Berkeley
The MacArthur Foundation Research Network on Building Resilient Regions (BRR) examines the power of metropolitan regions to respond to local and national challenges.  BRR brings together an interdisciplinary  group of scholars and practitioners to investigate why metro regions matter now, what constitutes resilience in the face of challenges, and what factors help to build and sustain strong metro regions.  The Network’s analyses focus on several broad-based national challenges where the regional response is especially significant.  These include: how growing regions address conditions such as increased traffic congestion and housing affordability; how regions that have lost manufacturing jobs build on existing strengths and attract new growth; how regions with large influxes of immigrants have responded to increased diversity and population pressures; and how the continued concentration and emerging deconcentration of poverty across metropolitan areas has affected access to opportunity and patterns of service provision.   While these challenges appear as defining characteristics of regions, their origins and paths of development are conditioned in large part by global technological and economic shifts and concomitant alterations in the international division of labor.

Filed under: Organizations

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Can anchor institutions build communities?

In a profile of Manhattan’s Morningside Heights neighborhood, the New York Times described the area dominated by Columbia University and Barnard College as one of the most desirable places to live in Manhattan. The universities are “anchor institutions,” acting as real estate developers, generators of human capital, and employers. So far, the academic and political debate about these organizations has not resolved whether these strategic investments build community and revitalize neighborhoods.

June 01, 2012

Filed under: Issues

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Census UK

Economic and Social Data Service
UK Census data.

Filed under: Data

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Center for Health and the Social Sciences

University of Chicago
Center encouraging interdisciplinary health and social science research at the University of Chicago.  

Filed under: Organizations

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Center for the Study of Race, Politics, and Culture

University of Chicago
Interdisciplinary program dedicated to promoting engaged scholarship and debate around the topics of race and ethnicity.

Filed under: Organizations

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Center for Urban History of East Central Europe (Ukraine)

As an institute of historical scholarship, we seek to offer fresh intellectual impulses and help abandon dated questions and preconceived answers. By information and open discussion, we try to help prevent history from being abused for political ends. Through conferences, seminars and exhibitions we hope to promote scholarly and cultural exchange.

Filed under: Organizations

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Center for Urban Initiatives and Research

University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee
The Milwaukee Urban Archive is designed as a catalogue of research studies and reports focused on greater Milwaukee and Southeastern Wisconsin. Each catalogued item provides bibliographic information, content abstract, source and, where possible, an electronic link to the report. The catalogue is organized by topical categories.

Filed under: Organizations

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Center for Urban Policy Research

Rutgers University
The Center for Urban Policy Research conducts basic and applied research on a broad spectrum of public policy issues, including affordable housing, land use policy, environmental impact analysis, state planning, public finance, land development practice, historic preservation, infrastructure assessment, development impact analysis, the costs of sprawl, transportation information systems, environmental impacts, and community economic development. 

Filed under: Organizations

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Center for Urban Studies- University at Buffalo

University at Buffalo
The Center for Urban Studies (CENTER) is a research and community development unit located in the UB School of Architecture and Planning. It's mission is to (1) engage in research that produces knowledge which contributes to understanding and solving the problem of neighborhood distress and building a sustainable urban metropolis (2) develop a model for transforming distressed urban neighborhoods into socially functional communities that are based on the principles of solidarity, collaboration, cosmopolitanism, reciprocity, participatory democracy and social justice, and (3) train students in urban and regional planning with the ability to recreate and rebuild a sustainable metropolis based on socioeconomic justice. 

Filed under: Organizations

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Center for Urban Studies- Wayne State University

Wayne State University
The mission of Wayne State University's Center for Urban Studies is to improve understanding of and provide innovative responses to urban challenges and opportunities. Committed to serving Detroit and its metropolitan area, the Center pursues its mission by conducting and disseminating research, developing policies and programs, and providing training, capacity-building, and technical assistance.

The Center participates in defining and influencing local, regional, state and national urban policy. It engages community, government, institutions, and policymakers in collaboration with university faculty and resources to transform knowledge into action.

Filed under: Organizations

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Cities in the 21st Century

International Honors Program
Cities in the 21st Century program examines the intentional and natural forces that guide the development of the world’s cities. It combines an innovative urban studies academic curriculum with fieldwork involving public agencies, planners, elected officials, NGOs and grassroots groups in important world cities where exciting changes are taking place.

Filed under: Links

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Cityscape

U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development
The goal of Cityscape is to bring high-quality original research on housing and community development issues to scholars, government officials, and practitioners. Cityscape is open to all relevant disciplines, including architecture, consumer research, demography, economics, engineering, ethnography, finance, geography, law, planning, political science, public policy, regional science, sociology, statistics, and urban studies. 

Filed under: Journals

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Colonial and Postcolonial Urban Planning in Africa

September 5–September 6, 2013
Institute of Geography and Spatial Planning, University of Lisbon
Lisbon, Portugal

Filed under: Events

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Consolidated Planning/ Comprehensive Housing Affordability Strategy (CHAS) Data

U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD)
The U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) periodically receives "custom tabulations" of Census data from the U.S. Census Bureau that are largely not available through standard Census products. These data, known as the"CHAS" data (Comprehensive Housing Affordability Strategy), demonstrate the extent of housing problems and housing needs, particularly for low income households. The CHAS data are used by local governments to plan how to spend HUD funds, and may also be used by HUD to distribute grant funds. 

Filed under: Data

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Cultural and Social Perspectives on Political Studies and International Relations

May 23–May 25, 2013
Aarhus University
Aarhus, Denmark

Filed under: Events

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Data SF (San Francisco)

City of San Francisco
DataSF is a central clearinghouse for datasets published by the City & County of San Francisco. The site allows you to find datasets in several ways: general search, tags/keywords, categories, and rating. The goal is to improve access to city data through open machine-readable formats. While the number and quality of datasets is increasing, we recognize there is much more that we can do. You can help by rating and commenting on existing datasets or by telling us what datasets we should make available to the public. 

Filed under: Data

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Does video camera surveillance make cities safer?

Law-enforcement agencies worldwide have been investing in closed-circuit television (CCTV). During the recent London riots, the ubiquity of the cameras proved instrumental to police, as about 2000 rioters were captured on video. While law enforcement has typically argued that cameras make cities safer, recent studies have questioned this claim, suggesting that their effectiveness might be limited and that their impact on citizens’ sense of safety might be the opposite of what governments intend.

September 01, 2011

Filed under: Issues

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Economic and Social Data Service

The Economic and Social Data Service is a national data archiving and dissemination service in the UK which came into operation in January 2003. The service is a jointly-funded initiative sponsored by the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) and the Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC).

The ESDS is a distributed service, based on a collaboration between four key centres of expertise:

UK Data Archive (UKDA), University of Essex
Institute for Social and Economic Research (ISER) , University of Essex
Manchester Information and Associated Services (MIMAS), University of Manchester
Cathie Marsh Centre for Census and Survey Research (CCSR), University of Manchester

These centres work collaboratively to provide preservation, dissemination, user support and training for an extensive range of key economic and social data, both quantitative and qualitative, spanning many disciplines and themes. The ESDS provides an integrated service offering enhanced support for the secondary use of data across the research, learning and teaching communities.

Filed under: Data

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Global Chicago Center

Chicago Council on Global Affairs
The Global Chicago Center of The Chicago Council on Global Affairs enhances Chicago’s strengths as a global city and raises awareness – both here and abroad – of Chicago’s global connections. It acts as a catalyst to bring Chicago's diverse global resources closer together and spread information on the city's many global connections.

Filed under: Organizations

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Integrated Public Use Microdata Series, Current Population Survey

Minnesota Population Center, University of Minnesota
IPUMS-CPS is an integrated set of data from 49 years (1962-2010) of the March Current Population Survey (CPS). The CPS is a monthly U.S. household survey conducted jointly by the U.S. Census Bureau and the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Initiated in the 1940s in the wake of the Great Depression, the survey was designed to measure unemployment. A battery of labor force and demographic questions, known as the "basic monthly survey," is asked every month. Over time, supplemental inquiries on special topics have been added for particular months. Among these supplemental surveys, the March Annual Demographic File and Income Supplement (hereafter referred to as the March CPS) is the most widely used by social scientists and policymakers, and it provides the data for IPUMS-CPS.

Filed under: Data

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Integrated Public Use Microdata Series, International

Minnesota Population Center, University of Minnesota
IPUMS-International is an effort to inventory, preserve, harmonize, and disseminate census microdata from around the world. The project has collected the world's largest archive of publicly available census samples. The data are coded and documented consistently across countries and over time to facillitate comparative research. IPUMS-International makes these data available to qualified researchers free of charge through a web dissemination system.

Filed under: Data

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Integrated Public Use Microdata Series, USA

Minnesota Population Center, University of Minnesota
The Integrated Public Use Microdata Series (IPUMS-USA) consists of more than fifty high-precision samples of the American population drawn from fifteen federal censuses and from the American Community Surveys of 2000-2009. Some of these samples have existed for years, and others were created specifically for this database. These samples, which draw on every surviving census from 1850-2000, and the 2000-2009 ACS samples, collectively constitute the richest source of quantitative information on long-term changes in the American population. However, because different investigators created these samples at different times, they employed a wide variety of record layouts, coding schemes, and documentation. This has complicated efforts to use them to study change over time. The IPUMS assigns uniform codes across all the samples and brings relevant documentation into a coherent form to facilitate analysis of social and economic change.

Filed under: Data

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International Network for Urban Research and Action

The basic purpose of the Network is to develop and promote the interaction of social and environmental urban movements with research and theoretical anlysis. INURA brings together theorists and practitioners sharing a common, critical attitude towards contemporary urban development. The Network wishes to maintain an informal and commmitted approach to its work.

Filed under: Organizations

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Look at Cook

Cook County, Illinois
Extensive data and visualization tools about the spending and budgets of Cook County, Illinois.

Filed under: Data

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Malcolm Wiener Center for Social Policy

Harvard University Kennedy School of Government
The Malcolm Wiener Center for Social Policy is a vibrant intellectual community of faculty, master's and Ph.D. students, researchers, and administrative staff striving to improve public policy and practice in the areas of health care, human services, criminal justice, inequality, education, and labor. The work of the Center draws on the worlds of scholarship, policy, and practice to address pressing questions. Over the last twenty years, the Wiener Center has been an influential voice in domestic policy through faculty work on community policing, welfare reform, youth violence, inner city poverty, youth and the low-wage labor market, American Indian economic and social development, and medical error rates.

Filed under: Organizations

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Metropolitics

Institut d'Etudes Politique de Paris (Sciences Po)
Metropolitiques.eu is an online journal aimed at enhancing the debates by confronting knowledge and know-how on the city, architecture, planning and territories in general.

Metropolitiques.eu is run by academics and professionals specialized in many different fields. It publishes analytical articles and reviews daily. The people at metropolitiques.eu hope to elicit a better diffusion of scientific, technical and political analyses of urban issues by academics, professionals and political officials, shift the lines of public debate, and thus allow for the emerging of new questions and new research interests.

With a network of corresponding editors in other countries (than France), metropolitiques.eu reaches for an international audience. It proposes a space of debate and reflection on the transformation of cities, especially in Europe. This is why the journal welcomes and publishes papers written in other languages and will translate them as much as possible into French or English.

Filed under: Journals

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Should research on urban poverty take organizations more seriously?

At a recent conference at the University of Chicago, scholars from across the country asked whether it was time to “rethink urban poverty” from a different perspective, one centered primarily on the organizations with which urban residents interact.

March 28, 2011

Filed under: Issues

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Stanford Center for the Study of Poverty and Inequality

Stanford University
The Stanford Center for the Study of Poverty and Inequality has five objectives: to monitor trends in poverty and inequality, to support scientific analysis of poverty and inequality, to develop science-based policy on poverty and inequality, to disseminate data and research on poverty and inequality, and to train the next generation of scholars and policy analysts.

Filed under: Organizations

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The Urbanophile

Aaron M. Renn is The Urbanophile, an opinion-leading urban affairs analyst, entrepreneur, speaker, and writer on a mission to help America’s cities thrive in the 21st century. In the Urbanophile he has created a destination for serious, in depth, non-partisan, and non-dogmatic analysis and discussion of the issues facing America’s cities and regions in the 21st century. The Urbanophile site began in 2006, and it has developed into one of America’s top urban policy destinations. 

Filed under: Links

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UK Data Archive

The UK Data Archive is curator of the largest collection of digital data in the social sciences and humanities in the United Kingdom. With several thousand datasets relating to society, both historical and contemporary, our Archive is a vital resource for researchers, teachers and learners. The archive is an internationally acknowledged centre of expertise in the areas of acquiring, curating and providing access to data. Since 2005 the archive has been designated a Place of Deposit by the National Archives allowing us to curate public records. The archive acquires high quality data from the academic, public, and commercial sectors, providing continuous access to these data while we also support existing and emerging communities of data users.

Filed under: Data

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United Cities and Local Governments

United Cities and Local Governments (UCLG) represents and defends the interests of local governments on the world stage, regardless of the size of the communities they serve. Headquartered in Barcelona, the organization’s stated mission is to be the united voice and world advocate of democratic local self-government, promoting its values, objectives and interests, through cooperation between local governments, and within the wider international community.

Filed under: Organizations

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Urban Affairs Association

The Urban Affairs Association (UAA) is the international professional organization for urban scholars, researchers, and public service providers.

The Urban Affairs Association is dedicated to creating interdisciplinary spaces for engaging in intellectual and practical discussions about urban life.  Through theoretical, empirical, and action-oriented research, the UAA fosters diverse activities to understand and shape a more just and equitable urban world.

Filed under: Organizations

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Urban Affairs Review

Urban Affairs Review (UAR), peer-reviewed and published bi-monthly, is a leading scholarly journal on urban issues and themes. For almost five decades, scholars, researchers, policymakers, planners, and administrators have turned to UAR for the latest international research and empirical analysis. UAR covers: urban policy; urban economic development; residential and community development; governance and service delivery; comparative/international urban research; and social, spatial, and cultural dynamics.

Filed under: Journals

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Urban Age

The Urban Age Programme, jointly organised with Deutsche Bank’s Alfred Herrhausen Society, is an international investigation of the spatial and social dynamics of cities centred on an annual conference, research initiative and publication. Since 2005, over ten conferences have been held in rapidly urbanising regions in Africa and Asia, as well as in mature urban regions in the Americas and Europe. As an event, the Urban Age catalyses the exchange of information, experiences and data across a global network of cities. The conferences operate as mobile laboratories, testing and sampling the social and physical characteristics of global cities through expert presentations and testimonials, research, site visits, mapping and informal information exchange.

Filed under: Organizations

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Urban Development

World Bank
The Urban Development database contains data on urbanization, traffic and congestion, and air pollution are from the United Nations Population Division, World Health Organization, International Road Federation, World Resources Institute, and other sources

Filed under: Data

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Urban Forum

This journal addresses the broad developmental issues of urbanization in the Third World, providing a distinctive African focus on the subject. It examines urban societies from a variety of perspectives, including: issues of local governance, the role of city planning in free market systems, and the impact of multiethnic and multicultural formations in urban affairs. Urban Forum makes a special effort to examine specific cities in developing nations as legal and cultural entities in their own right.

Filed under: Journals

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Urban Institute

The Urban Institute gathers data, conducts research, evaluates programs, offers technical assistance overseas, and educates Americans on social and economic issues — to foster sound public policy and effective government.

Filed under: Organizations

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Urban Planning, 1794-1918: An International Anthology of Articles, Conference Papers, and Reports

Cornell University
This site includes documents that are primary source material for the study of how urban planning developed up to the end of World War I. They include statements about techniques, principles, theories, and practice by those who helped to create a new professional specialization. This new field of city planning grew out of the land-based professions of architecture, engineering, surveying, and landscape architecture, as well as from the work of economists, social workers, lawyers, public health specialists, and municipal administrators.

Filed under: Links

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Urban Studies

Urban Studies is a fully peer reviewed international journal that publishes original research and review articles which deal with every kind of urban and regional problem that is susceptible to social science or other relevant analysis. These range from such problems as urban housing, employment, race, politics and crime, to problems of regional investment and transport. Although most articles published deal with problems located in the advanced industrial societies of Europe and the Americas, important articles dealing with these problems in Asia, the Third World and in Eastern Europe are also published regularly.

Filed under: Journals

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