Center Funded Research
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.
Call for Cornell Mui Ho Center for Cities Seed Proposals 2025
Recycled and Renewable Bioplastics as Alternative Building Components
David Costanza, Department of Architecture
This project explores the potential of recycled plastics and bioplastics as structural materials in architecture. The goal is to shift the perception of plastics from disposable to essential, highlighting their durability and affordability. The study seeks to address sustainability, resilience, and housing shortages through innovative material reuse by developing full-scale prototypes. The project uses an automated robotic fabrication process to expand the scope of 3D printing to create large building components with precision, reducing labor and promoting eco-friendly construction practices.
Scaling New York State Circular Construction: Policy Design Accelerator Phase 1
Felix Heisel and Jennifer Minner, Department of Architecture and Department of City and Regional Planning
The project team is collaborating with community organizations and industry experts in New York State to advance the paradigm shift from linear material consumption towards a circular economy in the construction industry. Funding from the Center for Cities enabled the successful completion of Phase 1 of a Policy Design Accelerator focused on creating a sustainable and scalable circular construction economy. Within four months, the project team engaged more than 25 stakeholders across academia, industry, and government, submitted five funding proposals (two of which were successfully awarded), developed a language library for future proposals, and secured immediate follow-up funding for Phase 2.
The Financialization of Housing in the United States
Suzanne Lanyi Charles, Department of City and Regional Planning
The financialization of rental housing by institutional investors – firms that pool money to purchase property for the financial benefit of their clients and shareholders – has become widespread across the United States. This project surveyed 73 local government officials in 31 states, asking about the nature of institutional investment in housing in their municipalities, any policies enacted in response, and policy tools they would ideally have at their disposal. Respondents expressed concerns about deleterious effects on access to safe, secure, and affordable housing in their municipalities, as well as on housing markets overall. They described a wide variety of policy responses, but noted that state inaction and preemption often severely hindered local responses. Whereas local governments are highly responsive to the concerns of their constituents and work to mitigate harmful effects, substantive intervention at federal and state levels of government is necessary to truly temper the financialization of housing.
Afterimages
Jennifer Newsom and Tom Carruthers, Department of Architecture
Afterimages is a multi-site installation, connected across four cities: Venice, Rome, Chicago, and Minneapolis. Optically, an afterimage is a desensitization of the eye's cones that delays the uptake of new information, causing us to see things twice. The work in this project builds on this definition as well as critical texts to consider a "figure seen twice," a metaphor for witnessing. The themes are explored through a series of constructions — likened to "drawings in space" — that interlace multiple perspectives to critically reexamine contexts and deep time. The work is dedicated to Darnella Frazier, who recorded the murder of George Floyd in May 2020. Center for Cities funding supported the research, development, and production of Afterimages I: Venice, exhibited at the 2023 Venice Bienalle Architettura, and Afterimages II: Rome, a fully designed and fabricated installation for future exhibitions at the American Academy in Rome.
Big Urban Data Initiative
Wenfei Xu, Timur Dogan, and Jesse LeCavalier, Department of City and Regional Planning and Department of Architecture
This cross-disciplinary initiative draws on diverse sources of big data to generate insights on key urban issues to support research, urban design, and planning. National cell phone data were acquired and analyzed over five months, and a new national segregation dataset, "A New Picture of Segregation," was created based on location data for people fitting different demographic profiles. The data were also used to validate the results from Urbano, a data-driven, agent-based model for simulating urban mobility. A new website is being developed to visualize the research data and facilitate its use by other scholars and stakeholders, and will go live in 2025. The project team also held a session with government and industry stakeholders to introduce them to the initiative, which was attended by staff from several New York City government agencies as well as several architecture firms.
Right to Heal: Energy Transitions and 'Design with Nature'
Esra Akcan, Department of Architecture
Architecture can play an important role in healing societies after conflicts and disasters. This seed grant supported ongoing work on a book that locates spaces of political and ecological harm, and calls for repurposing them as healing spaces where violence and violations are confronted, and accountability and reparations are instituted. Drawing on examples from sites around the world, each chapter focuses on a different type of conflict and disaster and related architectural programs, moving from individual, to communal, to planetary healing. The analysis shows how sudden shocks are rooted in history, connecting wounds in the present to the intertwined processes of colonization, nationalization, carbonization, and neoliberalization.
National Zoning Atlas
Sara Bronin, Department of City and Regional Planning
The National Zoning Atlas (NZA), undertaken by the Legal Constructs Lab at Cornell AAP, is developing an interactive, user-friendly online database and map that aims to provide insight into zoning regulations across the United States. The work has drawn substantial attention from the mainstream media as well as governance, planning, and urban affairs specialists. With this seed grant, the project team kick-started the creation of the New York Zoning Atlas, a vital component of the larger NZA project. The goal is to enable cross-jurisdictional comparisons, reveal regional and statewide trends, and also to democratize zoning information, foster public engagement, inform zoning reform advocacy, and level the playing field between land speculators, institutional investors, homeowners, and socioeconomically disadvantaged groups.
Modelling Urban Simulations: A Global Survey of Digital Twins of Cities
Farzin Lotfi-Jam, Department of Architecture
Digital twins are virtual replicas of physical urban environments that incorporate real-time data for dynamic simulations. This technology has become increasingly important for city planners, policymakers, and smart technology companies for urban management, development, and future planning. The project surveyed 60 digital twin implementations worldwide and conducted a detailed analysis of nearly 30, including cities like Amaravati, Johannesburg, and Singapore. It assessed platform capabilities, data collection practices, and the impact of these models on urban decision-making. The research has been shared through a public exhibition on the history of urban simulations and a workshop presentation in Singapore. An open-source dataset encapsulating these findings is also in preparation.
Urban Water Sources and the Depiction of Ecological Collapse
Dan Torop, Department of Art
In a changing climate, many places increasingly have either too much or too little water. This seed grant supported a photography project focused on two sites: Ludlowville Falls, north of Ithaca, and Owens Lake in Los Angeles. Sustained seasonal observation of Ludlowville Falls provided stark contrasts of a place that is sometimes deluged, sometimes water-starved. Owens Lake, meanwhile, was first drained, then re-engineered, at a cost of $2 billion, to create a “minimum viable lake” to mitigate fine particle dust and reconstruct bird habitat. Selected images were shown in spring 2023 at galleries in Brooklyn and Memphis. The artist plans to continue to photograph both sites and is also preparing a book.
City Leadership in the Time of COVID: Lessons from the American Rescue Plan
Mildred Warner, Department of City and Regional Planning
The American Rescue Plan (ARPA) sent funds to local governments across the U.S. to address structural inequalities exposed by the COVID-19 pandemic. With seed grant support, this project explored how local governments in New York State used their ARPA funds, the opportunities they identified, and the barriers they faced. The work included focus groups, a survey, and case studies. The survey, conducted in collaboration with state organizations of local leaders and the Center for Governmental Research, gathered almost 200 responses from local governments. The results were shared in an issue brief and at the spring 2022 Rockefeller Institute of Government Conference. Students delved deeper into innovative community responses through case studies of projects to address homelessness, affordable housing, water and sewer systems, access to childcare, and broadband access.