Center for Urban Science & Progress - NYU's Proposal to NYC

We want to update you on the University’s response to the City of New York’s call to create a new institute of applied science and engineering – our proposal to create the Center for Urban Science and Progress.<p>Background<p>In December 2010, the City of New York unveiled a thoughtful challenge that will be critical to the City’s future – creating a new applied science and engineering institute here.<p>New York is widely acknowledged as the world capital of finance and commerce, and the financial sector has been a – and probably “the” -- key source of the city’s prosperity for decades. But the economic downturn has caused all of us who care about New York to think about how to diversify the city’s economy and to ensure its future prosperity. Undertaking an effort to make the City a world capital of applied science – a field in which it cannot now lay claim to being a world leader, but which leverages many of our existing strengths as a world capital – is a far-sighted stroke.<p>This past summer, the City released an RFP to set this in motion.<p>NYU’s Proposal: The Center for Urban Science and Progress<p>The Core Idea: From its conception, NYU has been urban in outlook – “in and of the City,” as our founder, Albert Gallatin, wrote. Inherently, NYU’s community of scholars and learners believes in the complexity, diversity, density, and vitality of cities.<p>We have reached a turning point in the history of cities: the majority of humankind now lives in them. By mid-century, when the world’s population is estimated to exceed 9 billion, some 70 percent will live in urban areas. This rapid growth will inevitably be accompanied by challenges – infrastructure, the integration of technologies, public health, transportation, public safety, and environmental sustainability, to name but a few.<p>This reality is at the heart of our response to the City’s request-for-proposals (RFP). And so, we have forged an impressive and exciting consortium of leading universities and leaders in the technology industry to establish the Center for Urban Science and Progress (CUSP) in Downtown Brooklyn. It will be an applied science institute focused on researching and developing new solutions for the pressing and complex challenges that confront the world’s urban growth, one that will useNew York City itself as a “living laboratory” to conduct its research and to test its discoveries.<p>CUSP has the potential to propel New York City to the forefront of an emerging field of study, and also create a major new sector in our economy.<p>Partnership: To develop our proposal, NYU and NYU-Poly have been building an outstandingly strong partnership of universities and technology leaders who share our interest in cities and their futures. Our consortium includes Carnegie Mellon University, the City University of New York, the University of Toronto, the University of Warwick, and the Indian Institute of Technology Bombay as academic partners, and IBM and Cisco as the lead technology industry partners. Independently, each of the partners is a leader in its field; collectively, they bring unrivalled strength – in research, in engineering, in urban understanding, in innovation, and commercialization – to this project.<p>Using the city as a “living laboratory” will be important to CUSP’s research enterprise; we will work with municipal agencies in each of CUSP’s partner cities, using their real-world problems to target our research and apply our solutions in real-world settings. In New York, the Metropolitan Transportation Authority has already agreed to be our prototype partner in this sphere. In so doing, we will create a template for forming similar living laboratory partnerships with other agencies around the globe.<p>Academic Program: CUSP will be an important new academic program for us. Our proposal anticipates hiring a world-class director for CUSP by the fall of 2012 and starting graduate-level co...