According to the latest edition of the Planetizen Guide to Graduate Urban Planning Programs, DUSP/MIT is the top planning program in North America.  Since 2007, Planetizen's Guide has included rankings, and DUSP has consistently been listed as #1.  This year, the University of California--Berkeley and the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign round out the top three.

Calestous Juma, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Visiting Professor at MIT, received a LAAP Prize (Lifetime Africa Achievement Prize) for his leadership in socio-economic development in Africa. The award will be presented to Juma in Nigeria on October 10, 2014, by the Millennium Excellence Foundation.

Play the LA River is the launch project of Project 51, a collective of artists, designers, urban planners, writers, and educators (including DUSP MCP ’10 and current PhD student, John Arroyo, who is one of six co-founders).

A new article on the MIT News site asks DUSP Visiting Professor Calestous Juma three questions about economic growth in Africa.  Click here to see what he had to say.

Cellphone apps that find users car rides in real time are exploding in popularity: The car-service company Uber was recently valued at $18 billion, and even as it faces legal wrangles, a number of companies that provide similar services with licensed taxi cabs have sprung up.
What if the taxi-service app on your cellphone had a button on it that let you indicate that you were willing to share a ride with another passenger? How drastically could cab-sharing reduce traffic, fares, and carbon dioxide emissions?

Congratulations to DUSP Professor Brent Ryan, who was recently awarded a "Committed to Caring” honor from the Office of the Dean for Graduate Education.  The program recognizes MIT faculty members who "go above and beyond to make an impact in the lives of graduate students." Two new faculty members are recognized each month through a broad campus poster and web campaign.  Honorees are determined by a selection committee made up of MIT graduate students and staff.

In granting the award, the office noted,

Francisco Humeres (MCP ’14) focused on Power Centrality as a method for measuring a particular feedback property: How well connected are places to other well connected places. In this research Power Centrality is used to assess a recent model of Urban Structure; The Splintering Urbanism Theory of Graham and Marvin (2001). This theory posits that the contemporary city is a fragmented agglomeration of isolated urban pieces where distant but valuable fragments are highly connected between them, bypassing their less valuable surroundings.