UChicago Urban Labs
The University of Chicago Crime Lab partners with policymakers and practitioners to help cities design and test the most promising ways to reduce crime and improve human lives at scale. Building on the model of the Crime Lab, the University of Chicago launched Urban Labs in 2015 to help cities tackle urban challenges in the crime, education, energy & environment, health, and poverty domains.
Location: Chicago, Illinois
Summary
UChicago Crime Lab was launched in 2008 in response to increased civic attention focused on what more both the city and the University of Chicago could be doing to address the heartbreaking challenge of gun violence in Chicago. Founding researchers noted that while there is no shortage of innovation in public safety, the ability to make progress on this problem has been limited by a lack of rigorous evidence about what actually works, for whom, and why. The Crime Lab works with government agencies and nonprofits to design, test, and scale promising programs, doing action-oriented and policy-relevant research to improve lives. Based on the model of the Crime Lab, which was one of the first domestically focused policy labs in the US, UChicago launched the Education Lab in 2011, and in 2014 established the Urban Labs, doing this rigorous research in close collaboration with government partners across crime, education, health, poverty, and energy and the environment.
Using randomized controlled trials, insights from behavioral economics, and predictive analytics, the Urban Labs aim to generate evidence that can steer public funding into the policies and programs with the greatest potential to improve lives.
The Urban Labs have also held multiple Innovation Challenges, beginning with a Crime Lab competition in 2008, to crowdsource the most promising solutions to urban challenges, and then partner with winning organizations or programs to co-produce evidence of impact.
The UChicago Urban Labs, while physically located in Chicago (the Crime Lab also has a sister office in New York City) believe that evidence generated in collaboration with government partners has the potential to transcend context, informing efforts to improve outcomes in cities not only in Chicago, but in cities across the country and world. The Urban Labs also have carried out projects in other U.S. cities, and in Gujarat and Delhi in India.
Website: urbanlabs.uchicago.edu
Sector: Crime, education, health, poverty, and energy & environment.
Target Audience: Partners with nonprofits and government agencies to identify key challenges, design promising approaches, and use qualitative and quantitative methods to find the most effective solutions.
Services offered: Urban Labs offer strategic data analysis, identify trends in data, design interventions, and evaluate the impact of interventions. They also integrate administrative datasets across public agencies.
Analytical talent: The Urban Labs are led by University of Chicago faculty who are leaders in their fields of research and practice including education, crime, poverty, environment and health. The Labs also works with a network of affiliate researchers, leveraging the expertise and experience of renowned social scientists both at UChicago and from universities across the country, including Northwestern University, Duke University, and UC Berkeley. The Labs hosts post docs, and engages graduate and undergraduate students from UChicago as research assistants.
Data sources: The urban lab’s data sources vary according the needs of the project. For example, they used student-level administrative records from Chicago Public Schools for multiple research studies, including one studying the impact of summer jobs on reducing violence among disadvantaged youth. The Urban Labs have active data sharing agreements with many city, county, and state partners.
Ensuring Data Quality: The Urban Labs have a multi-faceted approach to quality assurance and research transparency. This includes the development of a pre-analysis plan, a thorough internal QA process that allows them to validate results prior to dissemination, and the uploading of statistical code and datasets whenever possible to allow other researchers to replicate and validate results. Projects at the Urban Labs also abide by all policies and procedures that the University of Chicago and their government agency partners require.
Data Governance and Oversight Mechanisms: Urban Labs enters into data sharing agreements with government agencies to access administrative data. If partner agencies of the Urban Labs require access to the data, they typically enter into data sharing agreements with the government agencies directly.
Methodology: The Labs use randomized controlled trials, predictive analytics, behavioral economics, and other rigorous methods to generate evidence that can help policymakers deploy public resources to address Chicago’s (and other cities’) most pressing problems. The Labs also provide technical assistance and strategic data analysis to public agencies and nonprofits, and link datasets to identify trends across government agencies and multiple focus areas.
Successes/ Impact: The UChicago Crime Lab was among the first policy labs in the U.S. and therefore has played an important role in bringing evidence-based practices and rigorous research into social policy, and has served as a model for subsequent policy labs. It has also enabled collaboration amongst disparate stakeholders and agencies, bringing together academics, city officials, nonprofits and community members, to create and test multi-faceted solutions to urban challenges. The Lab first began to address the related problems of youth violence and high school dropout in Chicago, and since the launch of Urban Labs in 2014, the work has expanded to other domains and internationally (with Energy and the Environment projects ongoing in India). The Labs have generated evidence about what works across these domains, and have successfully steered many millions of public dollars into more effective, evidence-based solutions to pressing policy challenges. As urban populations continue to grow rapidly worldwide, this work to improve the quality of urban life remains critical.
Sample Project: Becoming a Man (BAM) program. One of first UChicago Crime Lab projects was an evaluation of the BAM program, implemented by Chicago nonprofit Youth Guidance, to address gun violence amongst school age youth in Chicago. The winner of the first Crime Lab competition to crowdsource promising ideas from the community, the program works by helping youth slow down in high-stakes situations and reflect on the impulsive, even automatic behavior that drives so much of the violence in cities across the country. It provides weekly group sessions during the school day that use cognitive behavioral therapy. The Crime Lab tested the effectiveness of the program using randomized controlled trials (RCTs). They found that participation in the program reduced violent crime arrests by up to 50%, improved school engagement, and increased on-time high school graduation by 19%.
Funding resources: The Urban Labs are funded by a combination of grants from Foundations, competitive federal grants, and generous support from individual donors.
Contact details: urbanlabs@uchicago.edu