The Center for Advanced Urbanism (CAU) provides a home for faculty interested in collaborative research projects that will engage student participation. CAU is the umbrella for various existing research laboratories and faculty projects. It organizes collaborations between these labs and other MIT groups in order to foster a cross-disciplinary expertise.
The Changing Places group proposes that fundamentally new strategies must be found for creating the places where people live/work, and the mobility systems that connect these places, in order to meet the profound challenges of the future. We are developing technology to understand and respond to human activity, environmental conditions, and market dynamics.
Engineering System Division – Infrastructure and Transportation address the challenge of improving the effectiveness of national infrastructures, including those providing electric power, transport, and communications. ESD research in the domain of critical infrastructures include cross-domain views; comparative architecture and the factors affecting them; new models that include both the technical and social complexities; and new, large-scale simulation techniques allowing the combination of quantitative and qualitative data.
Mobility Systems is a cross-cutting research and education initiative in DUSP, which takes an integrative trans-disciplinary approach, aiming to better understand the fundamental relationships between mobility and the built and social environments, and using that knowledge to create sustainable systems. We have a multi-scale perspective - designing and developing interventions for neighborhoods, cities, regions, and mega-regions – and work globally to derive practical mobility innovations.
The SENSEable City Laboratory's research focuses on studying and predicting how digital technology is changing the way we describe, design, and occupy cities.
Interconnected computational elements are increasingly saturating the built environment (whether small-scale mobile devices, or larger-scale infrastructural microprocessors). This new condition allows us to design technology that could function as an interface between people and the city.