Mui Ho
Center for Cities

The Cornell Mui Ho Center for Cities transfers knowledge to action to build more equitable and sustainable cities today and in the future.

Symposium
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Cornell Mui Ho Center for Cities Symposium: 
Climate Resilience in New York City

The Cornell Mui Ho Center for Cities will host an in-person symposium on Climate Resilience in New York City. The one-day event will focus on actions to mitigate risks to people, buildings, and infrastructure from extreme weather.

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Center Funded Research
Overhead photo of land and buildings.

Call for Cornell Mui Ho Center for Cities Seed Proposals 2025

The center provides competitive seed funding to AAP tenure and tenure track faculty. Seed grants support new research that informs action on the ground and leads to more ambitious and sustained research on cities and urban issues.

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Initiatives
1

Urban Climate Change Mitigation and Adaptation

Climate change and its effect on urban populations is one of the greatest challenges of our century. This initiative generates new, actionable, and scalable knowledge about how cities can mitigate and adapt to climate change. Current work focuses on flooding, extreme heat exposure, and air quality in New York City. Supported by a planning grant from the National Science Foundation (NSF), the team is developing a transdisciplinary proposal for a new Civic-led Urban Adaptation Research Center (CIVIC-UARC) that brings together experts across multiple disciplines and institutions, civil society organizations, the public sector, and private industry to support equitable, sustainable, and inclusive approaches to urban climate change adaptation.

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2

Just and Equitable Cities

Rising urban inequality is one of the most wicked and entrenched problems facing cities around the world. This initiative supports research and practices that address how to design, plan, and build more just and equitable cities. Current work focuses on rapid urbanization contexts where new urban residents live in informal settlements that lack access to core urban infrastructure and services. These residents face the constant threat of eviction and efforts to push them to the urban periphery. It is well documented that this pattern of forcing informal settlement residents to the urban periphery, as well as the self-provision of core services, exacerbates city-wide problems of congestion and low productivity, as well as reinforcing patterns of rising urban inequality. The solution is city-wide, participatory, in situ informal settlement upgrading.

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3

Big Urban Data

How can big spatial data be used to understand our dynamic cities? This cross-disciplinary initiative aims to catalyze longer-term urban big data infrastructure to accelerate research, teaching, and engagement-focused urban design and planning practice. It will build our data and technical capacity as a generative resource for researchers and external partners, ranging from public agencies to urban design firms.

Faculty Labs

Transportation Access and Policy Lab

Nicholas J. Klein

Focused on urban transportation, the lab studies the role that transportation plays in social and economic mobility, public opinions, and new technologies.

Just Places Lab

Jennifer Minner

A multi-disciplinary research lab for igniting creative action, public imagination, and participatory place-keeping in the built environment.

Environmental Systems Lab

Timur Dogan

Specializes in sustainable architecture and urbanism through research across design, engineering, computation, and building performance simulation.

Local Government Restructuring Lab

Mildred Warner

From finance and infrastructure policy to economic development, planning, and public health, the Local Government Restructuring Lab explores cutting-edge research to inform public practice.

Rural-Urban Building Innovation Lab

Leslie Lok

Explores the intersection of urbanization, novel material methods, and technology to create and experiment with hybridized design and construction processes in the urban fringe.

Design Across Scales Lab

Alex Kobald, J. Meejin Yoon

A research platform, creative think tank, and incubator working at the intersection of the built environment, technology, sociology, and ecology.

Realtime Urbanism Lab

Farzin Lotfi-Jam

Investigates the social impacts of new technologies that virtualize cities and populations. The lab produces research using extended reality interfaces, gaming engines, agent-based simulations, digital twins, and smart urban systems.

&Lab

Suzanne Lettieri, María González Pendás

A space born out of collaboration aimed at fostering new pedagogies and modes of public and civic-academic alliance through architectural design, architectural humanities, and the modes of research, teaching, and learning that animate them. 

Housing + Property Lab

Suzanne Lanyi Charles

Examines the effects of global housing investment on local neighborhoods and household access to affordable, secure, and stable housing.

Water In, Water Out Lab

Victoria A. Beard

Produces new research on the water to waste cycle, across actionable scales, from source protection to household access. The lab connects knowledge to action to create more equitable and sustainable urban water management systems.

Housing Innovation Lab

Katharina Kral

Investigating the intersections of environmental, societal, and well-being concerns linked to housing, the lab explores synergies between building performance and quality of life across scales and their potential to reshape domestic space and architectural workflows. 

Legal Constructs Lab

Sara Bronin

Leads interdisciplinary projects in property, land use, historic preservation, and energy, inquiring into how law can foster more equitable, sustainable, well-designed, and connected places.

Regenerative Architecture Lab

Marta H. Wisniewska

Investigates alternative building materials and innovative construction techniques for a healthier and more regenerative built environment in the context of developed and developing territories.

Circular Construction Lab

FELIX HEISEL

Activates research to shift material consumption toward a circular model for designing and building a sustainable, low / no-carbon construction industry.

Adaptive Land Lab

Linda Shi

Studies why cities adopt regressive climate adaptation practices and what alternative approaches to property rights, land use and fiscal policies, and regional governance would enable more equitable and sustainable futures. 

Aerial view of urban zone with canal running through center.

Friday, March 7, 2025

Join the Climate Action Conversation: Register Now for the Center for Cities' Spring Symposium in New York City

On April 24, the Cornell Mui Ho Center for Cities will convene experts to share solutions and identify areas for future action that address the multiple and cascading climate change hazards facing New York City.

A man and woman standing in a wooded field at sunset

Tuesday, January 28, 2025

Art Faculty Jen de los Reyes and Oscar Rene Cornejo Awarded 2025 Creative Capital Project Grant

The unrestricted funding will support their work LAND, a site of education, research, cultivation, care, and conservation.

Students walk with local community members down a street between homes and shops

Friday, January 17, 2025

Reimagining Informal Housing in Mathare, Kenya

Negotiating the challenges of safe, reliable, and affordable housing, Cornell AAP architecture and planning students collaborated with Slum Dwellers International and local residents to explore alternative housing design and construction strategies for Mathare, an informal settlement in Nairobi, Kenya.
In the Media

North America's Biggest City is Running out of Water

Vox: Mexico City is facing a water crisis, and it won't be the last city to do so. CRP Professor Victoria Beard says climate change is just one of the contributing factors.

Monday, May 13, 2024

Why Drivers May Soon Pay $15 to Use New York's Busiest Streets

The Christian Science Monitor: New York is due to become the first US city to charge a congestion toll on drivers entering its central business district in Manhattan. CRP Assistant Professor Nicholas Klein says that if the goal is to reduce congestion, a charge is the right approach.

Tuesday, April 2, 2024

Mexico City Runs Short on Water — a Public Good that's "Increasingly Difficult" to Provide

Los Angeles Times: Mexico City is facing a serious water shortage as leaky pipes, rapid development, and climate change converge. CRP Professor and Director of the Cornell Mui Ho Center for Cities Victoria Beard says more cities will face "day zero" scenarios as urban water gets "increasingly difficult" to provide.

Thursday, March 21, 2024

Mapping the Future

Business Insider: The report explores the potential impact of the National Zoning Atlas, a project led by CRP Professor Sara Bronin, on correcting the current low-inventory, high-priced US housing market.

Wednesday, February 21, 2024
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