In the fourth IDG student profile, we meet fifth-year PhD student Deepak Lamba-Nieves as he reflects on his time at DUSP, his plans for the future and what it means to study international development within a city planning context.
1. What were you doing before you came to DUSP?
The School of Architecture + Planning at MIT announces a major new research initiative called the Center for Advanced Urbanism that will tackle planning, design, construction and retrofitting of urban environments for the 21st century.
To tap into creative design solutions and explore ways to spur development in a new downtown “Arena, Arts and Entertainment District,” DUSP alum Jeff Fugate (SM/MCP, 2007), President and COO of the Lexington (KY) Downtown Development Authority, organized an international competition to design a new downtown park.
At a recent ceremony of at the Royal Overseas League in London, Professor Eran Ben-Joseph's book ReThinking a Lot: The Design and Culture of Parking was nominated for a National Urban Design Award as one of six top books in urban design from 2012.
In their remarks about the book, the judges noted:
Stephen Kennedy (MCP’12) and Alice Shay (MCP’12), co-founders of the
In January, Eran Ben-Joseph took over as the head of MIT's Department of Urban Studies and Planning, succeeding Amy Glasmeier who is stepping down after four years in the post to focus on teaching and research.
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This paper proposes a simple, automated method to detect rural to urban land use changes at the pixel level of SPOT-Panchromatic images in the developing world. The proposed method entails two tasks: (1) classification of images as either urban (built-up) or rual (non bult-up) at a relatively high level of spatial detail (pixel level) in order to include the classification of houses made of natural nmaterials. The binary classification was performed through a combined thresholding of spectral information and spatial information derived by a normalized high-pass filter.