The Harvard Mellon Urban Initiative aims to foster scholarship and disseminate knowledge connected to the understanding of cities and urbanization processes across the globe. We bring together multiple perspectives to address fundamental questions about changes to urban conditions across diverse sites and scales, with focus on a set of interwoven concerns:
- Spatial, historical, and experiential dimensions of inequality and diversity, including the multi-layered relations between built forms, identities, and diasporas; cities as sites of segregation, conflict, and injustice, as well as of cultural vitality, social networks, and creative potential.
- Ecological and socio-environmental dimensions of urbanization, with attention to the changing relations between cities and hinterlands over history and in the present, including in the context of climate change.
The Urban Initiative foregrounds how the knowledge and insights of architecture, urbanism and the humanities inform (and transform) one another as well as our larger questions about economic, ecological, and cultural transformations. We have a focus on the Arts, Humanities, and Design, but with a broader goal of advancing collaborative projects bridging research and pedagogy, qualitative and quantitative approaches, empirical and theoretical methods. After all, not only does no single discipline own urban studies, several share it. Opportunities for faculty and students will be publicized soon. Please be patient as we updated our website.
Co-directors: Bruno Carvalho (FAS), Eve Blau (GSD), Neil Brenner (GSD).