The Georgetown Global Cities Initiative (GGCI), a Georgetown University initiative dedicated to studying cities and urbanization, showcased students’ research at its annual Student Research Summit on Feb. 21.
The summit featured the interdisciplinary research of 13 undergraduate and graduate students exploring global urban life. The summit, now in its seventh year, enabled student researchers to present their work through panel discussions that highlighted the connections between their efforts.
Uwe Brandes, GGCI faculty director, said increasing trends of urbanization make urban research especially important in the 21st century.
“Urbanization represents one of the most important megatrends of the 21st century,” Brandes told The Hoya. “We are living in unprecedented times — the size, scale and pace of global urbanization is completely without precedent. And so one of the central questions we ask is: ‘How can we think about global urbanization as a force to produce positive outcomes?’”
“Whether that’s climate change, the formation of social capital or human development, urbanization really has got to be part of each of those conversations,” Brandes added.
Bela Walkin (GRD ’25), who presented her research on the benefits of walkable cities, said she hopes her research can help explore alternatives to the United States’ dependence on cars.
“Vehicle emissions are one of the number one singular sources of emissions in the United States, particularly duty and personal vehicles,” Walkin told The Hoya. “I wanted to explore neighborhood walkability as a tool that could be used to disincentivize personal vehicle use and influence people’s transportation decisions.”
Walkin said personal experience living in an urban environment in Europe inspired her research on walkable cities.
“When I was a few years out of undergrad, I spent a year teaching English in Lyon, France, and I was opened to this whole new way of life when you’re free from a car,” Walkin said. “For the first time I was living in a city that was designed for people.”
Reed Asselbaye (LAW ’25), whose research encompassed equal access to public spaces, said the summit’s diversity of research inspired him to present.
“I think what drew me in is the opportunity to engage with other disciplines in a way that highlights work that’s going on and shows how collaboration can happen across different practice areas,” Asselbaye told The Hoya. “Everyone brought a different approach, and seeing people from public policy, from the environmental management program and Ph.D. students were all participating — that was a big attractor for me.”
Asselbaye, whose work analyzed several case studies across the United States to study urban public spaces, said such places should be more common.
“We need public space for health and social cohesion and just overall wellbeing,” Asselbaye said. “We have a loneliness epidemic, we have an epidemic of distrust and a built environment of car-centrism and a lack of publicly accessible spaces. My research was really a call to city governments to use creative mechanisms to try to improve public spaces.”
Asselbaye added that he believes municipal and local governments are obligated under the Tenth Amendment, which reserves powers for the states, to include public spaces in cities.
“My core premise is that the Tenth Amendment’s power delegation to the state and local governments implores these subnational entities to explore solutions to public space access,” Asselbaye said.
Walkin said she was excited to hear from other student researchers doing similar work at the summit.
“I was really impressed by it,” Walkin said. “I learned a lot. I enjoyed hearing from my fellow peers and it’s just really exciting to hear that there are other people interested in and who get excited about the same nerdy academic topics that I get excited about.”
Asselbaye said student researchers should learn from all disciplines even as they focus on one subject, such as urban research.
“I would say it’s inherently multidisciplinary,” Asselbaye said. “It’s not something you can do in a vacuum.”
“Yes, have your specialty that you’re knowledgeable about, but be able to pull from other disciplines and what scholars in those fields have said using their own unique research methods,” Asselbaye added.
Brandes said the summit succeeded in highlighting specific, community-focused urban research while tying together a broad scope of interests.
“We’ve convened students with very different interests all together, but the common denominator is either research that’s place-based or community-based,” Brandes said. “We saw that in a really great way this year.”
