Urban Lab
Urban Lab is an empirically oriented research initiative at Uppsala University, run in cooperation between the Department of Economics and the Institute for Housing and Urban Research.
Raoul van Maarseveen awarded the Benzelius prize
Urban Lab's Raoul van Maarseveen has been awarded the Benzelius Award 2023 for his dissertation "Urbanization and Education. The Effect of Childhood Urban Residency on Educational Attainment." The Benzelius Award is annually presented by the Royal Society of Sciences in Uppsala. The prize consists of a monetary sum of 25,000 SEK and a diploma.
Raoul defended his thesis in 2022 and will commence a position at the University of Cologne in Germany this autumn.
Research on emergency calls published in the prestigious The Economic Journal
Marina Toger, university lecturer at the Department of Human Geography and researcher within the Urban Lab, has had a study published in the prestigious The Economic Journal. The article "Police Response Time and Injury Outcomes" is co-authored with economists Gregory DeAngelo and Sarit Weisburd. The study is based on data from calls to the American emergency number 911 in Dallas and evaluates how the prioritization of the alarms of violence can affect the injury status of the victims. The results show that increased response time increases the probability that an event will result in an injury. The effect is particularly prominent among female victims, suggesting that faster responses may play an important role in reducing harm related to domestic violence.
Urban Lab's PhDs receive their doctorates
Urban Lab's two PhDs, Raoul van Maarseveen and Adrian Poignant, have now received their doctorates. Raoul van Maarseveen with the thesis "Urbanization and Education: The Effect of Childhood Urban Residency on Educational Attainment" and Adrian Poignant with "Gold, Coal and Iron: Essays on Industrialization and Economic Development".
MorfO - a tool for urban planning
Towns and cities may be built in various ways. Thus, various places may look different and various parts of the same city may also differ from each other. Hötorgscity in central Stockholm, for example, does neither look like its neighbouring areas reachable just one stop away with the metro, nor like the neighbourhoods at the ends of the metro lines. The various areas in a city are sometimes separated by barriers (such as rivers and railways), sometimes the borders are less pronounced.
- Urban morphological might be of importance and MorfO divides Sweden’s urban localities (>2 000 inhabitants) into areas based on various urban-morphological characteristics and presence of barriers. In total 8 540 areas have been subdivided in this way, says Jan Amcoff, Associate Professor at the Deaprtment of Human Geography and affiliated to Urban Lab.
Download the files here
For more information about MorfO, please contact Jan.Amcoff@kultgeog.uu.se
The map to the left illustrates the variations in urban morphology and how these variations are reflected in the MorfO-subdivision, using Mariestad as an example.
Magdalena Dominguez to London School of Economics (LSE)
Magdalena Dominguez, who has been part of the Urban Lab crew for a year, has now been recruited to London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE)- The Centre for Economic Performance (CEP) were she will start as a Research Economist in the Policing and Crime research group and the Community Wellbeing Programme.
As much as we are sad about seeing her go, we are equally proud to see her go to such an amazing new position and we are extremely grateful for all her fantastic work and her contributions to our research environment here at the Urban Lab.
Read more about Magdalena and her research here: Gang-sweeps- crime and welfare, Crime composition in gang enclaves and Community based interventions and inequality
RESEARCH ON RENTAL FLATS ASSIGNED USING A LOTTERY
Alive Bostad AB has begun building 162 rental apartments in Rosendal in southern Uppsala. The goal is to offer apartments to young adults (18–35) with about 30 per cent lower rents than equivalent housing. The buildings, designed by Tengbom arkitekter, are being built from wood, and the apartments will be assigned using a lottery.
Urban Lab researcher winner of the 2020 IPUMS Research Award
Raoul van Maarseveen's article “The Effect of Urban Migration on Educational Attainment: Evidence from Africa” has been selected as the 2020 winner of the IPUMS Research Award.
Read about the award and Raoul's research here.
Funding
Urban Lab is a collaboration between Uppsala municipality and Uppsala University.