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Former NYC Transit Brooklyn HQ To Become Cutting Edge Urban Research Center

NEW YORK (CBSNewYork) - Downtown Brooklyn will soon be the home of a breakthrough research and science center focusing on the issues of urbanization around the world, WCBS 880's Rich Lamb reported.

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The former New York City Transit headquarters building at 370 Jay Street will be transformed into the Center for Urban Science and Progress.

"The new center will bring some of the world's greatest minds together to start to study the technical, engineering, academic, and human challenges posed by our rapidly urbanizing world," Mayor Michael Bloomberg told reporters on Monday.

The mayor's office said the center's completion date will be 2017, but the first class will be accepted in September 2013, and will grant degrees in engineering and science.

It'll be led by NYU and NYU-Poly, but will also involve CUNY, Carnegie Mellon University, the University of Toronto, the University of Warwick in England, the Indian Institute of Technology in Bombay, plus IBM and Cisco.

"The motto of our proposal was 'New York City as the thought capital of the world. New York City as the provider of this new service of urban theory to the world,'" said NYU President John Sexton on Monday.

A statement from the mayor's office said that technologies developed at center are expected to generate $5.5 billion in overall economic impact and 7,700 jobs over the next three decades.

Does New York as a high-tech "thought capital" of the world sound good to you? Sound off below.

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