Catalyzing a Cross-Disciplinary, Cross-University Urban Research Agenda in the Age of Digital Data

波士顿地区研究倡议（巴里），一个新的实体，总部设在哈佛的拉德克利夫高级研究所，建议催化和追求一个跨学科，跨机构的城市研究议程，利用数据的机会提出了正在进行的数字革命。 拟议的项目将围绕三个主要活动组织，每个活动都得到巴里在波士顿地区大学、公共部门机构和私营公司的丰富数据持有者和用户网络的支持：1）识别和获取描述大波士顿地区的人和地方的数据。2）支持巴里网络成员利用下一代数据与传统数据源和新方法进行的原始合作研究。3）建立一个原型数据库，对支持当前研究议程的数据以及分析中出现的二级数据集进行存档和编目，使未来的工作和教学应用程序能够建立在这些初始项目的基础上。 知识产权近年来，城市中的许多公共和私人机构已经开始收集从高质量到足够质量的行政数据，范围从社区状况的实时描述符，到个人之间的沟通和社区之间的流动，再到教育、卫生和经济领域的模式。这些下一代数据共同为创建城市中人类行为的全面图景提供了基础，这些数据有可能改变整个社会，行为和经济科学中的城市治理和行为的理论模型。巴里致力于推动城市研究议程，利用这些数据，重点关注三个横向主题：1）社区的稳定和变化，特别是社区及其居民在时间上相互塑造的社会过程。2）城市的社会结构，或人际关系，态度，跨越社区的制度关系创造了一系列连锁结构，这些结构可能影响资源分配和社区运作的方式。3）认知和背景，特别是认知机制和文化叙事如何驱动城市社区的行为，以及这些行为对给定社区的特征及其与其他社区的关系的影响。拟议的议程将由巴里的领导团队，一组经验丰富的城市学者在哈佛大学和东北大学，以及更广泛的巴里网络，其中有100多名成员，包括教师从十个波士顿地区的大学和专家从一系列政府机构和私营公司。该项目还将与芝加哥等其他城市的举措合作，旨在产生可推广的知识和可移植的方法战略。更广泛的影响从这个项目中出现的学术著作将有助于利用下一代数据的丰富内容的计算社会科学的发展。由此产生的见解也将为教学和政策创新提供基础，巴里与公共部门的紧密联系加强了从研究到实践的转化。 最后，拟议项目的努力和产品将为其他城市的类似工作铺平道路，并有助于比较城市科学。

The Boston Area Research Initiative (BARI), a new entity based at Harvard's Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, proposes to catalyze and pursue a cross-disciplinary, cross-institutional urban research agenda that capitalizes on the data opportunity presented by the ongoing digital revolution. The proposed project will be organized around three main activities, each supported by BARI's rich network of data holders and users at Boston-area universities, public-sector agencies and private companies:1) The identification and procurement of data that describe the people and places of the greater Boston area.2) The support of original collaborative research by members of the BARI network that utilizes next-generation data in conjunction with traditional data sources and new methodologies.3) The construction of a prototype Data Library that archives and catalogs both the data supporting the current research agenda, and the secondary data sets that emerge from their analysis, enabling future work and teaching applications to build off these initial projects. Intellectual MeritIn recent years, many public and private institutions in cities have begun collecting administrative data from high to adequate quality, ranging from real-time descriptors of neighborhood conditions, to communication between individuals and movement between neighborhoods, to patterns in the education, health, and economic sectors. These next-generation data collectively provide a basis to create a comprehensive picture of human behavior in cities that has the potential to transform theoretical models of urban governance and behavior throughout the social, behavioral and economic sciences. BARI seeks to stimulate an urban research agenda that utilizes these data with a focus on three crosscutting themes: 1) Stability and change in neighborhoods, especially the social processes by which neighborhoods and their residents reciprocally shape each other across time.2) The social structure of the city, or how interpersonal, attitudinal, and institutional relationships that cut across neighborhoods create an interlocking set of structures that potentially influence resource allocation and the way that neighborhoods operate.3) Cognition and context, specifically how cognitive mechanisms and cultural narratives can drive behavior in urban neighborhoods, and the consequences those behaviors have for both the characteristics of a given neighborhood and its relationships with other neighborhoods. The proposed agenda will be undertaken by BARI's leadership team, a set of experienced urban scholars at Harvard and Northeastern Universities, and the broader BARI network, which has over 100 members including faculty from ten Boston-area universities and experts from a range of government agencies and private companies. The project will also collaborate with initiatives in other cities, such as Chicago, and is designed to yield generalizable knowledge and portable methodological strategies. Broader ImpactsThe scholarly works that emerge from this project will contribute to the development of a computational social science that utilizes the rich content of next-generation data. Resulting insights will also provide the basis for teaching and policy innovations, with the translation from research to practice enhanced by BARI's already strong ties with the public sector. Finally, the efforts and products from the proposed project will pave the way for similar work in other cities and contribute to a comparative urban science.