The Center currently focuses on four key initiatives: 1) Global Neighborhoods; 
2) the Urban Historical Initiative; 3) the Urban China Research Network; and 4) the Hudson-Mohawk Regional Workshop.  These initiatives examine the impact of global change on the U.S. metropolis and civil society, probes the 19th and early 20th Century roots of present-day cities and suburbs, and address urban change in other parts of the world, mostly notably China.
 
 

Many Mumford Center scholars study urban change in U.S. cities, with a special concern for issues of racial and ethnic diversity, immigration, and impacts of global connections on cities and neighborhoods.

Featured in the Fall 2001 issue of UAlbany Magazine and supported by the Ford Foundation, The Mumford Center is conducting a continuing project to disseminate information from Census 2000.  Periodic reports deal with questions of residential segregation and neighborhood inequalities.   A recent report, entitled Choosing Segregation: Racial Imbalance in American Public Schools, 1990-2000, reveals that policies of school desegregation, evident in the 1989-90 school year, have given way to substantial increases in black-white segregation in many metropolitan regions.

Mumford researchers have worked together on a study of neighborhood change in the New York Metropolitan Region since 1980.  Begun in the early 1990s, the project includes both demographic analyses and neighborhood case studies.  Collaborators on this project include sociologists John Logan, Richard Alba, Nancy Denton, and Min Zhou (now at UCLA); geographer Christopher Smith; and political scientist Todd Swanstrom ( now at St. Louis University).

Other projects related to immigration issues include sociologist Richard Alba's forthcoming book Remaking the American Mainstream:  Assimilation and Contemporary Immigration and Ray Bromley's research on neighborhood change in the Bronx, New York.  Doctoral candidate Charles Zhang is looking at the secondary migration of recent immigrants in the United States while Sociologist Ronald Jacobs is at work on a project examining the treatment of immigration issues by the African American Press.

Jose Cruz is at work on two book projects: a political history of Puerto Ricans in New York City during the period 1960-1990 and a comparative case-study of coalition-building between African-American and Latino elites in Chicago and New York City during the administrations of Harold Washington and David Dinkins, respectively.  Allen Ballard is writing his next novel about black soldiers in WWII.

Other projects examine issues of stratification and mobility within the metropolis.  Scott South's project (supported by the National Science Foundation) is examining the impact of residential mobility and school transitions on American youth's sexual activity, educational achievement, delinquency and criminal involvement. Katie Schiller, funded by the National Center for Education Statistics, the National Institute of Child Health and Development and the National Science Foundation, is currently researching factors influencing students' trajectories through high school mathematics curriculum and the transition to post secondary education. 

 

Seeking to bring historical perspectives to the study of urban change, The Mumford Center counts among its current projects John Logan's study of minority and immigrant incorporation in the New York Metropolitan Region since 1880 and doctoral candidate Deirdre Oakley's dissertation research entitled Fallacies of the American Welfare State: The Enduring Community Response to the Needy - Homeless Shelters and Relief Services in New York City During the 1920s and 1990s.  Of interest to urban scholars and genealogists alike, The Center is also developing a series of unique data sets including neighborhood maps in New York and Chicago during the 1880-1940 period (based primarily on census data).

NYC-Extending northward to 50th Street, (1851) Paul E. Cohen 1997 Rizzoli International Publication, Inc

One unique data source is a set of block maps of Manhattan in 1900 prepared by the Tenement House Commission.  Click here to connect to these maps, which depict the number of households and the main ethnic groups of residents for every block. 

Another project is tracing census records for a large sample of New Yorkers and Chicagoans, starting in 1920 and linking back to the 1900 census.  The result will be a panel study of how these people's lives changed during a 20-year period: their neighborhoods, their families, and their jobs. 

US News & World Report (July 2001) has featured a story about some people in our pilot study, comparing the residents of some Manhattan neighborhoods today with the occupants of the same buildings in 1900.  Click here to find information about more than 50 New Yorkers whom we traced between 1900 and 1920.  This site includes details from the census about household members, in both years, data about the neighborhood where they lived, and local area maps. 

Established in 1999, the Urban China Research Network is a multi-disciplinary, multi-institutional network of scholars conducting and supporting research on urbanization in contemporary China. A joint venture between the Lewis Mumford Center and the Center for Social and Demographic Analysis (CSDA), this Network is a virtual research center based in Albany, and extended internationally. Its purpose is to strengthen contacts and collaboration among international scholars with interests in urban China.  In July 1999, the Network sponsored an international conference in Shanghai on the "Future of Chinese cities," bringing together over 130 scholars from 20 countries. Selected papers have been published as The New Chinese City: Globalization and Market Reform (Blackwell 2001), edited by John R. Logan.

• Go to Urban China Research Network Homepage

 Many scholars associated with the Mumford Center, as well as those at other institutions in upstate New York, conduct research about community and economic issues in this region and throughout the state.   To support such work, the Mumford Center has begun to develop an archive of information about population, housing, and economic trends.  The New York State Social Indicator Project maps local area information at the county, city and town, and census tract level.  This archive uses Geographic Information Service technology to allow people to view key characteristics of their community, to see how their area has changed over time, and to compare it to surrounding areas.  

The Hudson-Mohawk Regional Workshop seeks to make scholarly  expertise more readily available to public agencies and community groups.  A step in this direction was the HUD-sponsored project on Economic Revitalization in the Mohawk Valley, which the Center conducted jointly with Fulton-Montgomery Community College.  This project assessed the current and potential contributions of colleges and universities to development concerns in the region, featured in a conference on development issues in the region in December 2001.  It has resulted in a web archive: the Hudson Mohawk Community Outreach Inventory, with information on outreach programs of more than a dozen institutions.