Director's Office Labs Annual Letter 2025

Below are highlights from the Director's Office Labs initiatives:

Economic Mobility: In 2025, the Economic Mobility Initiative advanced major efforts in public scholarship, workforce research, and new media formats while strengthening partnerships and securing new philanthropic support. Key achievements include contracting with the New Press for The Small-Dollar Solution—the culmination of research supported by the ECMC Foundation, The Kresge Foundation, and Lumina Foundation—and launching a Lumina Foundation-funded campaign  with a publicist and digital marketer to expand the book’s reach. In parallel, the initiative conducted qualitative research in Appalachia on adult workforce reskilling in communities confronting obsolete industries. This work produced an op-ed in the Financial Times selected for its “One Must-Read” newsletter, a long-form feature in The American Prospect, and a local op-ed. With new support from Ascendium Philanthropy, the initiative began expanding the project into additional media and moved forward with a multimedia website that will stimulate public discussion about the complexity of twenty-first-century economic development in Appalachia and in other regions adapting from older, dirtier industries to cleaner ones. The site will feature best practices that help workers and their children pursue dignified, stable, and equitable employment, grounded in interviews with workers, employers, training providers, apprenticeship staff, workforce advisors, labor representatives, and local development leaders. Additionally, the initiative advanced an offshoot podcast project on one West Virginia community’s fight for clean water following mining-related contamination and began securing new funding for the podcast.

Order Without Design: Senior Fellow Alain Bertaud traveled extensively in 2025, promoting the principles of Order Without Design: How Markets Shape Cities through global advisory missions. Across Brazil, Czechia, India, Morocco, Thailand, and the United Kingdom, he gave interviews, advised practitioners and government officials, delivered speeches on housing and urban land management, and taught the masterclass “How Markets and Planning Shape Cities.” His writing appeared in CapX (“How to Build a City”) and Discourse (“Why Casablanca Is the Quintessential City Movie”), with additional coverage in The Economist  (and here) and the Hindustan Times. Finally, the Institute of Town Planners India honored Bertaud for his “outstanding contributions to urban planning, shaping our understanding of cities and inspiring urban planners worldwide.”

Sustaining Places: In 2025, the Sustaining Places Initiative continued to inform and shape a burgeoning global movement focused on a place-centered approach to improving cities and lives. After an article he co-authored was featured as the lead story in the Brookings Metro January 2026 newsletter, Fellow Tim Tompkins gave keynote speeches elaborating on this approach at events as divergent as the Global Placemaking Summit in Toronto, Canada, and the Public Design Forum in Gwangju, Korea. Whether facilitating a “Place Governance” session among peers from around the globe in Toronto or discussing different value capture mechanisms around the country at the “Making Missing Markets” and “Flourishing Neighborhoods” conferences at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, he shared preliminary findings about the governance and finance mechanisms that sustain multi-sector partnerships at the hyperlocal level. And at two Marron events featuring Tokyo-based authors, one focused on “area management” mechanisms and the other focused on “Designing the Spontaneous City,” the Institute explored one global city’s perspective on how to nurture vibrant and authentic places.

Other Programming: In collaboration with the NYU Office of the Provost, we hosted twenty undergraduates for a week of research-methods training. This led to a new four-credit course offered through the Gallatin School of Individualized Study, offering mentored research projects with our faculty starting in spring 2026. We hope to continue to provide experiential learning opportunities to students and to collaborate across the university.