Annual Report
Ideas, Inquiry, & Impact: Celebrating 20 Years of Urban Research
August 6, 2025
Ideas, Inquiry, & Impact: 2024-2025 Annual Report
A Message from Penn IUR’s Co-Directors and Advisory Board Chairs
The 2024–2025 academic year marks Penn IUR’s 20th anniversary. Throughout the year, we celebrated two decades of ideas, inquiry, and impact in urban research with our network of partners and scholars across the globe, investigating cities in all their complexity and sharing findings that move us toward a more sustainable urban future.
To commemorate the occasion, we launched a new website featuring more engaging content as well as accessible, user-friendly site navigation that highlights current activities around Climate Change & Resilience, Urban Development, Rapid Urbanization, Housing, State & Local Finance, and Anchor Institutions.
Penn IUR also introduced its Scholarly Voices Series, recognizing Faculty Fellows and their many contributions to urban scholarship and policy, locally, nationally, and globally. Some of the voices featured thus include Gilles Duranton (Wharton) on the growth of cities; Dennis Culhane (SP2) on the emerging crisis of aged homelessness; Laura Perna (GSE) on access to education; Megan Ryerson (Weitzman) on resilient, environmentally efficient transportation; and John MacDonald (SAS) on addressing abandoned housing to improve public safety. Please follow the links to learn more about their remarkable research that continues to inform how we live in our shared communities.
Penn IUR recognized its 20-year partnership with Penn Press—home to The City in the Twenty-First Century (C21) book series—with a special anniversary event, “The City in the 21st Century: Celebrating the Reflective Practitioner.” Enrique Peñalosa Londoño, former mayor of Bogotá, Colombia, offered insights from his recent book, Equality and the City: Urban Innovations for All Citizens. A discussion featuring other C21 authors, including Judith Rodin, Manny Diaz, and Richard Freeland, followed.
This year, Penn IUR’s research focused on housing affordability, the economic impacts of the new administration on states and municipalities, how to finance urban climate resilience and nature-based solutions, and how to assess urban innovation. Notably, as the Secretariat for the Sustainable Development Solutions Network Global Commission for Urban Sustainable Development Goals (SDG) Finance, Penn IUR supported the conceptual development of a Green Cities Guarantee Fund. The report aligns city interests with the reform of the world’s multilateral development banks. To continue work like this—and promote it in international forums—Penn IUR formed a strategic partnership with the Corporación Andina de Fomento (CAF)—the Development Bank of Latin America and the Caribbean.
Penn IUR also contributed key messages for the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s (IPCC) special report on cities and led the development of the From Grey to Green: Better Data to Finance Nature in Cities report with the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP), released during COP16 Colombia. From Grey to Green guides cities on tracking, budgeting, and scaling their investments in nature and provides practical tools for accessing financing. In addition, Penn IUR worked with the Guangzhou Institute for Urban Innovation on an urban innovation assessment tool and contributed to the book Urban Sustainable Development: Governance, Finance, and Politics, in collaboration with the Brazilian Center for International Relations (CEBRI) at the U20 Rio Summit.
New partnerships with Korea Housing Finance Corporation and the National University of Singapore’s (NUS) Institute of Real Estate and Urban Studies deepen Penn IUR’s commitment to advancing housing finance and urban policy solutions on an international scale. The celebration of the anniversary year culminated in the spring with the 20th annual Urban Leadership Forum in April 2025, where we were honored to have Penn President Larry Jameson open the event, recognizing Yvonne Aki-Sawyerr, Patrick Harker, and Enrique Peñalosa with the Lawrence C. Nussdorf Urban Leadership Prize. Several honorees from years past joined us for this celebration, making it a memorable event.
Access to affordable housing, barriers to building climate resilience, and navigating the impacts of national policies on cities and their citizens remain primary concerns. Understanding how urban policy and practice shape cities and our collective prosperity is more relevant than ever before. In the pages that follow, we share Penn IUR’s activities from the past year with deep gratitude to all of you who joined us and supported us along the way—our advisory boards, faculty and scholars, funders, institutional partners, staff, attendees, as well as our students, the new urban leaders. Here’s to the next 20 years of urban research! (Download PDF)
Selected Contents
Briefs and Special Reports
Mauricio Rodas, Eugénie Birch, William Burke-White, Laura Frances Mueller-Soppart, Amanda Lloyd
SDSN Global Commission for Urban SDG Finance Recommendations Report
September 14, 2024
Stephanie Moulton, Vanessa Perry, Edward Golding, Susan Wachter, Jun Zhu, Jung Choi, Amalie Zinn
Thinking Outside the Credit Box: Strategies to Advance Equity in the Housing Finance System | Ideas from the HUD Next Generation of Housing Policy Roundtable
October 7, 2024
Pedro Vormittag, Marianna Albuquerque, Eugénie Birch
Urban Sustainable Development: Governance, Finance, and Politics
November 14, 2024
Amanda Lloyd, Samuel Geldin, Eugénie Birch
From Grey to Green: Better Data to Finance Nature in Cities
October 26, 2024
Mauricio Rodas, Eugénie Birch, Luke Campo
The Green Cities Guarantee Fund: Unlocking Access to Urban Climate Finance
November 7, 2024
Arthur C. Nelson, David Damore
Megapolitan America Revisited: Demographic Trends to 2040
February 6, 2025
Arthur Acolin, Kwan-Ok Lee, Keith Leung, Desen Lin, Susan Wachter
Housing Affordability and Demographic Outcomes
May 22, 2025
Expert Voices
Expert Voices 2025 | Access to Sustainable and Affordable Housing
