DUSPMIT

Department of Urban Studies and Planning
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
77 Massachusetts Ave, Room 7-346
Cambridge, MA 02139
(617) 253-1907
duspinfo@mit.edu

Annual Report

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Department of Urban Studies and Planning: Report to the President 2007-2008

Highlights

Last year's report celebrated the Department's number one ranking a national study of graduate urban planning programs; this year we can happily report that we have retained our top position: in June 2008, following a significant overhaul of their ranking methodology, Planetizen (an organization dedicated to exchanging public information on urban planning) found DUSP to be the top-rated urban planning program in North America. The rankings looked at a number of factors, including measures of student quality, faculty quality, student-faculty ratios, diversity, financial aid, and the rating of the program among both planning professionals and planning educators. Interestingly, DUSP scored #1 among both practitioners and educators.

This year marked the 75th anniversary of the Course in City Planning at MIT (although the Masters Program was not created until 1935, MIT's first City Planning Course officially began in 1933-34 as part of the Architecture Department), and we also celebrated the 40th anniversary of the Department's Special Program for Urban and Regional Studies (SPURS). To recognize and celebrate this milestone, the Department sponsored a number of different activities, including:

The Department also hosted its bi-annual Visiting Committee in 2007-2008, chaired for the first time by Larry Fish. The Committee found the Department to be strong, having successfully acted upon the issues raised during the previous visit. In particular, they expressed enthusiasm for the high quality of the Department's rising junior faculty, our renewed attention to undergraduate education, the improved health of the Center for Real Estate, and our ongoing efforts to enhance DUSP's diversity. Key concerns highlighted in the report were the need to increase funding for graduate students (especially doctoral students in the fourth year of study), ongoing problems with space allocation (including the overall amount of space allocated to the department, as well as the fractured nature of it), and the need to continue to strengthen and build on relations with alumni/ae.

The year saw a successful tenure review for Associate Professor Balakrishnan Rajagopal and promotions for Lynn Fisher and Lorlene Hoyt to the rank of Associate Professor without tenure.

In the Fall the Department launched the new Community Innovators Lab (CoLab), a research and development institute focused on understanding the relationships among reflective practice, community development and social change. This effort grows out of and continues the work of the Center for Reflective Community Practice, and supports the mission of DUSP by bringing together the best thinking in planning and information technology with the learned experience of community practitioners.

Lastly, looking ahead, the Department is entering a period of transition. In September 2006, the Dean appointed an advisory committee to assist her with finding DUSP's next Department Head. In September 2007, with the Dean's concurrence, the committee initiated an outside search. Throughout its history, the Department has always generated its leadership internally (though there were failed external searches in both 1955 and 1970). This time, howeverdue largely to the lack of successful tenure cases between 1991 and 2004 that has caused a temporary shortage of younger full professors who could now be considered for Headwe have looked beyond the corridors of MIT. After an involved, extensive, and extremely participatory search, the committee has recommended Amy Glasmeier, Professor of Geography and Regional Planning at Penn State University, who has agreed to come with a start-date of January, 2009. At the request of the Dean and the Search Committee I have agreed to postpone my sabbatical for 6 months and stay on as Head until then. We will use the interim period to prepare a tenure and appointment case for Professor Glasmeier.

Faculty Awards

Professor Anne Whiston Spirn received a Guggenheim Fellowship to write Top-Down/Bottom-Up: Rebuilding the Landscape of Community, a book on her twenty years' experience working with residents of an inner-city neighborhood in West Philadelphia.

Eran Ben-Joseph, Associate Professor of Landscape Architecture and Planning, has been awarded a commendation by the International Archive of Women in Architecture (IAWA) for Against All Odds: MIT's Pioneering Women of Landscape Architecture, a project exploring MIT's influential yet little-known program in landscape architecture.

Associate Professor Xavier de Souza Briggs's book, The Geography of Opportunity, won the Paul Davidoff Book Award from the Association of Collegiate Schools of Planning.

Assistant Professor Lorlene Hoyt received MIT's Martin Luther King, Jr. Award, and her work with MIT@Lawrence was recognized by the President's Higher Education Community Service Honor Roll and the Ernest A. Lynton Award for the Scholarship of Engagement (see below).

Associate Professor Eric Klopfer received the American Institute of Biological Sciences Education Award. The award is presented to an individual or group who has made significant contributions to education in the biological sciences, at any level of formal or informal education. The award recognizes Professor Klopfer and the Scheller Teacher Education Program (STEP) which he directs. Under his leadership the program has developed an extensive network of K-12 teachers to enhance its efforts.

JoAnn Carmin, Associate Professor of Environmental Policy and Planning, has been awarded a 2008 Contemplative Practice Fellowship from the Center for Contemplative Mind in Society for her practicum class on "Urban Climate Vulnerability, Adaptation, and Justice."

Mel King, Emeritus Director of the Community Fellows Program, received the Architects/Designers/Planners for Social Responsibility "Lewis Mumford Award for Peace, Environment, and Development."

Professor Karen R. Polenske won the 2007-2008 Alfred P. Sloan Foundation Industry Studies Best Book Award for her book, The Technology-Energy-Environment-Health (TEEH) Chain in China: A Case Study of Cokemaking (Springer 2006). In a letter from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, Gayle Pesyna calls the book "an absolute exemplar of an industry studies book," noting that "the book deals with the problem of how changes in production technology are affecting energy intensities, the environment and human health in one of the dirtiest industries in the world." In July 2007, she was also named a Fellow of the International Input-Ouptut Association for her outstanding scholarly contributions to the field.

DUSP's newest faculty member, Alan Berger (Associate Professor, Urban Design and Landscape Architecture) has been named as part of one of the 10 winning teams selected in an international competition for the future of metropolitan Paris.)

The "Digital Water Pavilion," designed by Professor Carlo Ratti's SENSEable City Lab for the 2008 Zaragoza Expo in Spain, was named by Time Magazine as one of the "Best Inventions of the Year" for Architecture.

At the Commencement Lunch in June, the DUSP Student Council presented awards to three faculty members:

DUSP's Contribution to MIT-Wide Efforts

The "Responsive City" Group convened its lunch series in both Fall 2007 and Spring 2008. At these weekly meetings faculty and researchers from across the Institute discussed (and pioneered) the evolution of a new technologies for planning and city building, coordinating real-time data and ambient urban information to visualize and manage urban places in a more cost-effective, humanistic, and energy-efficient ways. The group collaborated on a proposal for funding under the National Science Foundation's "Integrative Graduate Education and Research Traineeship" (IGERT) program.

In April DUSP and the School of Architecture and Planning jointly sponsored an Exhibition in the Compton Gallery entitled "Urban Design and Civil Protest." The exhibition, curated by Tali Hatuka, Marie Curie Research Fellow and Fulbright Fellow at DUSP, explored "the socio-spatial dynamics of protest."

Coinciding with the opening of "Urban Design and Civil Protest," the Department sponsored the first bi-annual Ross Silberberg (1990) lecture, bringing the renowned urban anthropologist James Holston from the University of California at Berkeley to present a talk and slide show entitled "Insurgent Citizenship." Based on his book of the same name, his presentation in the Bush Room described his fieldwork and research in the urban slums of São Paulo, Brazil, drawing interesting parallels with the gallery exhibition next door.

In addition to individual faculty achievements and those projects mentioned above, DUSP also continued to contribute to several MIT-wide efforts: MIT Energy Initiative, MIT-Portugal Program, New Century Cities, Campus Planning and Urban Ring initiatives, MIT International Advisory Committee, Program on Human Rights and Justice, Teacher Education Program, various MISTI programs, and more.

Professors Susskind, Frenchman, Karen R. Polenske, P. Christoper Zegras, and Eran Ben-Joseph remained active members of the School of Architecture and Planning's (SA+P) Energy Council. This group was established by Dean Adèle Naudé Santos to ensure SA+P involvement in the campus-wide Energy Initiative. Working across all the units of the School, the Council recommended multi-year research and teaching efforts focused on the Energy Efficient City. The hope is that SA+P can provide a "demand-side" balance to the supply-side emphasis on the rest of the campus, and DUSP has recently appointed MIT alum Harvey Michaels to teach new subjects in this area and help coordinate the energy efficiency research of the MIT Energy Initiative (MITEI). Still to come, we hope, is a greater focus on patterns of city and regional development that can combine with government support of renewable energy sources to reduce reliance on fossil fuels and cut the emission of greenhouse gases. Already, though, it is clear that 2007-08 will be remembered as a year when an emphasis on sustainable development and responses to climate change have firmly entered the DUSP curriculum and the research mindset of many DUSP faculty.

Professor Zegras continues as the leader of the Transportation Systems Focus Area of the MIT-Portugal Program, a multi-year research and educational program involving several Portuguese universities and MIT departments.

Professor Frenchman, with Professors William Mitchell of the Media Lab, and Emeritus Senior Lecturer Michael Joroff, continued a cross-campus interdisciplinary research effort involving design of the "Digital Mile" in Zaragoza, Spain, as part of the New Century Cities initiative. They also continue to serve on the international advisory committee for the project along with Distinguished Visiting Professor Manuel Castells. Also in Zaragoza, the SENSEable City Lab and Associate Professor of the Practice Carlo Ratti designed the "waterwall" entrance pavilion to the Zaragoza World Exposition on Water and Sustainability.

Professor Frenchman continues to serve on the MIT Framework and Urban Ring committees, dealing with critical issues facing the campus and its relationships with the Cambridge-Boston community.

The Program on Human Rights and Justice, sponsored by DUSP and the Center for International Studies hired a new assistant, organized several human rights talks, co-hosted human rights events, and supported seven summer human rights internships with organizations around the world. The summer interns, many of whom were students from DUSP, were supported this year by a grant from the Graduate Student Council and an alum. Substantial time and effort was spent on fund raising.

MIT's Scheller Teacher Education Program (STEP), led by Professor Eric Klopfer of DUSP, gained its new name as the result of a gift from Joseph and Rita Scheller, and continues to provide a curriculum leading to teaching licensing for MIT undergraduates, enabling several MIT graduates to teach math and science at the middle school and high school level, where quality education is sorely needed. STEP also continues its cutting-edge research program in educational technologies. For more information on recent STEP activities, see http://education.mit.edu.

Research and Teaching on Urban Planning

The intellectual life of the Department is organized largely around the activities of four Program Groups and several cross-cutting research initiatives. The Program Groups include City Design and Development (CDD); Environmental Policy and Planning (EPP); Housing, Community and Economic Development (HCED); and the International Development Group (IDG). We have also designated Urban Information Systems, Transportation Policy and Planning, and Regional Planning as cross-cutting initiatives, intended to bring together faculty from across the four main program groups.

City Design and Development (CDD)

The CDD group, led by Professor Dennis Frenchman, has had a very busy and eventful year, with news to report on teaching, publication, and a number of special events.

Anne Whiston Spirn completed her third book, Daring to Look: Dorothea Lange's Photographs and Reports from the Field (University of Chicago Press, 2008). She is currently working on a new book on her experience in an inner-city neighborhood in West Philadelphia (see "Faculty Awards," above).

The Department was pleased to host jurors for the tenth annual EDRA/Places Awards program. These awards specifically recognize both professional and scholarly work in environmental and urban design.

Richard Sennett has written a new book which cuts across disciplines and explores the nature of craft, practice, and quality, entitled The Craftsman (Yale Univeristy Press 2008). In April Richard shared some insights into this process when he presented his thoughts at a well-attended book talk as part of the ongoing City Design and Development Forum, used to launch a successful mini-conference that brought together Richard's graduate students from MIT and the London School of Economics.

During the January IAP period, Dean Adèle Naudé Santos, Dennis Frenchman, and Architecture professor Meejin Yoon conducted a special workshop on Retrofitting Central Xizhi (Taipei).

In the Spring of 2008, Professor Tunney Lee's Planning Studio returned to China's Pearl River Delta, where they have worked since 2005 on issues of sustainable neighborhood development. An interdisciplinary group of planning and architecture students undertook extensive research on selected topics and tested them through hypothetical re-planning of an existing project, Vanke Town, a 50 hectare housing development. This year's studio report, Sustainable Shenzhen: Residential Development for Livable Futures, recorded that planning process and outlines a series of ideas and guidelines for developing a sustainable community in Shenzhen (and other parts of China) in the future (see http://shenzhen.mit.edu/~11.306/wiki/index.php?title=Main_Page).

Students in Eran Ben-Joseph and Terry Szold's "Community Growth in Land Use Planning" course worked for the City of Lowell to produce a report studying the Gateway Bridge and the Western Merrimack neighborhood. The students worked with the City and neighborhood to assess existing conditions and create a vision for improvement with both short- and long-term implementation strategies. The plan included consideration of open space, streetscape, transportation, housing & community development, and "catalyst properties."

Professor Eran Ben-Joseph's "Site and Urban Systems Planning Studio" took 12 DUSP students to Biloxi to work collaboratively with a team from Mississippi State University and the University of Minnesota to address planning and development issues in the Mississippi Gulf Coast. Students developed proposals recommending how East Biloxi might address the low-lying marsh areas and explored how proposed higher density residential development might connect to the existing neighborhoods of East Biloxi.

The newest member of the DUSP family, Alan Berger, formally joined the Department as of January 2008 but will arrive in the fall, following completion of his Rome Prize year at the American Academy. In the meantime, he has produced a new edited volume, Designing the Reclaimed Landscape (Taylor & Francis 2008), which explores "ecologically sustainable thinking about the design and management of reclaimed, post-industrial landscapes."

Lecturer Ann Bookman joined the Community Innovators' Lab as a Fellow to launch a new project on Community Design and the Aging Population.

In addition to serving as Department Head (his sixth consecutive year in this position), Lawrence Vale completed a substantially updated and expanded second edition of Architecture, Power and National Identity (Routledge 2008). The book examines capital cities and parliamentary districts on every continent (except Antarctica) to explore the relationship between urban design and the formation of national identity. In April he visited Abu Dhabi to help officials think through the plans for a new capital city for the United Arab Emirates (intended to house 350,000 people), and he continues his involvement in Thailand (with Professors Frenchman, Ralph Gakenheimer, and David Marks [Course I]) working with the Bangkok Municipal Administration on a new Urban Green Development Institute.

After a long and productive career as an architect, planner, professor, dean, and devoted civic servant, John de Monchaux retired this year. DUSP and the School of Architecture + Planning honored his career in December at the final session of the City Design & Development Fall Forum dedicated to his work. John will continue to work in the department as a Professor Emeritus.

We are saddened to report that Professor J. Mark Schuster (PhD 1979), died Feb. 25, 2008, of complications from melanoma. He was an expert on arts funding policies and respected leader of First Night and other Boston cultural events. Professor Schuster began teaching at MIT in 1978, becoming an assistant professor in 1984 and a full professor in 1999. The Department worked with his family in a memorial service in Bartos Theater, as well as a "Mass Luminaria" lantern lighting ceremony in Killian Court. Students, faculty, and staff contributed funds for the planting of a pair of memorial street trees as well. The Department also sponsored a "Thesis Throwdown" celebration in April 2008 to commemorate Prof. Schuster's longtime dedication to the teaching of a thesis preparation subject.

Environmental Policy and Planning (EPP)

Under the leadership of Professor Lawrence Susskind, the Environmental Policy Group began the year with three main priorities. The first was to identify a new faculty member to expand teaching capabilities. After a search, the Committee recommended the appointment of Harvey Michaels as a full time Lecturer in Energy Policy; he will join the faculty in July 2008, teaching a fall semester course on Energy Efficiency and Integrated Resource Planning and a spring Practicum on Energy Efficiency. He will also assume responsibility for a new MIT-wide study on the future of energy efficiency sponsored by the MIT Energy Initiative. He brings extensive industry experience with enhanced use of information technology to expand residential and commercial energy efficiency.

A second priority was to build a firmer financial base for the MIT-USGS Science Impact Collaborative ("MUSIC"). With support from the MIT central administration and the Dean of the School of Architecture and Planning, DUSP appointed an external MUSIC Advisory Committee to take responsibility for building an endowment to support eight graduate interns a year. In addition, MUSIC was successful in arranging multi-year financial support for a linked set of action-research projects in coastal communities from Maine to Florida and for initiating a global consortium of action-research projects around the world.

A third priority was to catalyze a more substantial campus-wide commitment to environmental and sustainability studies. Through participation in the Committee to Assess Environmental Activities at MIT, the work of the Visiting Committee, and DUSP's leadership in creating the MIT Faculty Environmental Network, the group contributed to the MIT's new Environmental Initiative.

During the Spring sabbatical of Professor Susskind, Associate Professor JoAnn Carmin served as Head of the EPP group. She organized two workshops for the European Consortium for Political Research on environmental capacity building, held in Rennes, France and Pisa, Italy, and also prepared a background paper on urban climate adaptation in Europe and Central Asia for a forthcoming World Bank report. In the fall she was invited to present her research on civil society and NGOs in Central and Eastern Europe to government officials and NGO representatives at the Sixth Ministerial Conference, Environment for Europe, held in Belgrade.

Professor Carmin's Practicum in Durban, South Africa, assessed how climate adaptation measures could be mainstreamed across the municipality. The class also initiated work on an online tool that will help municipalities around the world learn about how their ongoing activities link to climate adaptation and how they can improve their efforts in this area. Students working with Professor Carmin also worked updated the "Directory of Environmental Organizations in Central and Eastern Europe" and prepared a summary report on the status of NGOs in the region for the Regional Environmental Center for Central and Eastern Europe.

Professor Judith Layzer teamed up with HCED Professor Xav Briggs to offer a new subject called "Sustainability in Action" (11.949). In this course, students were challenged to devise an equitable approach to urban environmental sustainability for the City of Boston. Nearly twenty students enrolled, concentrating on planning for one of five specific sectors: buildings and energy; food; transportation; waste; and water. The final projects included a composting program for Boston residents, a suite of projects to encourage local food consumption, a plan for energy efficient retrofits in foreclosed homes, a website and informational video on work-bike transport, and a plan to convert targeted impervious areas of the City to greenspace to improve water quality and groundwater recharge.

Professors Layzer and Carmin also initiated the MIT Project on Society, Business, and the Environment (MIT-SBE), hosting a variety of domestic and international research projects and educational activities focusing on how business can become more sustainable. The program was launched with a fall luncheon seminar series bringing five different speakers to campus to share their views.

In January the Department co-sponsored a "Sustainable Development Forum" with New Ecology, Inc. and the Sloan School of Management. Sessions included "Greening Your Business," "The Role of Governance & Regulation in Promoting Sustainability," "Living with a Green Building," "Education for Sustainability," "Local Tools for Climate Change Action Planning," "Sustainability at Home," "Green Building Operations: Healthcare, Schools and Offices," and "Renewable Energy and Energy Conservation."

In conjunction with the MIT Program in Human Rights and Justice, Professor Susskind and the Traditional Navajo Peacekeepers Project sent a team of students to the Navajo Nation to work on ways to resolve land use, energy, and environmental disputes using traditional peacekeeping techniques along with contemporary mediation tools.

A delegation from the Beijing Law School visited the MIT-Harvard Public Disputes Program in the Fall to learn way to integrate negotiation and dispute resolution into their curriculum, with particular attention to how these techniques can be applied to the resolution of land development and environmental disputes in China.

Lecturer Jonathan Raab again offered a course in "Developing Energy Policies for a Sustainable Future" that attracted students from across the Institute.

Housing, Community, and Economic Development (HCED)

Students from the Department returned to Springfield's North End neighborhood once again this Spring, this time with Visiting Professor Gus Newport. The Springfield Studio focuses on the physical, programmatic, and social renewal of this predominantly Puerto Rican community with strong social networks, a high level of community involvement, combining classroom work with an applied class project.

In the largest-ever study of interracial friendship in America, Professor Xavier de Souza Briggs and other researchers found that people who are involved in community organizations and activities and who socialize with their co-workers are much more likely to have friends of another race than those who do not. Briggs' study analyzed data from the Social Capital Community Benchmark Survey, designed and led by Harvard political science professor Robert Putnam. It appeared in the December issue of City & Community, the urban research journal of the American Sociological Association.

In collaboration with PolicyLink and Citizen Housing and Planning Association (CHAPA), Professor Lorlene Hoyt prepared a report entitled "Voices from Forgotten Cities: Innovative Revitalization Coalitions in America's Older Small Cities." Her research highlights the daunting economic challenges faced by smaller industrial cities and the promise they hold, and finds that progress in retooling for economic competitiveness and reinvigorating civic life will come from the creativity and commitment of leaders both old and new.

In addition to several awards described earlier, Assistant Professor Lorlene Hoyt also has a new co-edited volume on Business Improvement Districts: Research, Theories, and Controversies (CRC Press 2008), which includes a chapter based on her work, entitled "From North America to Africa: the BID Model and the Role of Policy Entrepreneurs."

As part of an increased effort to collaborate across Program Group lines on issues of urban sustainability, Professor Xav Briggs teamed up with EPP Professor Judith Layzer to offer a new subject called "Sustainability in Action" (11.949) (see above).

Over the January IAP session, Ceasar McDowell, Amber Bradley, and Dulari Tahbildar explored the field of "progressive planning," and Xav Briggs offered an introduction to implementation strategies.

International Development Group (IDG)

In the academic year 2007-2008 the International Development Group (IDG) hosted one of its largest incoming classes of MCP students in recent memory. The program group continued to work closely with the SPURS program and IDG alumni to develop new internship opportunities here and abroad for enrolled students. A formal agreement was made with the UN-Habitat Office in Nairobi to host annual summer interns, as well as with the Mayor's Office in Guadalajara, Mexico, adding to the current opportunities already available.

Professor Diane Davis, IDG group head, joined the newly formed MIT International Advisory Committee chaired by Assoc. Provosts Philip Khoury and Claude Canizares. Professor Davis continues her research and writing on cities in conflict and the emergence of violence and crime in cities of the global south, publishing several chapters in edited volumes and refereed journals, and giving a keynote lecture on the subject at the University of Utrecht and invited presentations at the London School of Economics, the Woodrow Wilson Center, the Council on Foreign Relations, and the Graduate Institute of International Studies in Geneva. She also served as a key consultant for the Canadian Department of Foreign Affairs and International Trade on the topic of urban violence in cities of the developing world. This year Davis was appointed to the Scientific Research Committee of the European Research Council and will serve on that body for the next two years.

Last year's report described MIT's Jerusalem 2050 Program, a joint initiative sponsored by the Department of Urban Studies and Planning and the Center for International Studies, co-directed by Professor Diane Davis. This year, the Department was pleased to announce the winners of its global "Just Jerusalem" competition. The open contest sought proposals that addressed different aspects of urban life in a future Jerusalem. Participants were asked to look beyond the current nation-state conflict and, instead, focus on 'just' the city as a place where, by mid-century, its citizenries co-exist in peace. More than 1,150 people representing 85 countries registered for the competition; four winning entries and seven honorable mentions were selected. The selected proposals, or their authors, hail from all over the world: Malaysia, Austria, the United States, India, Israel, Palestine, China, England, Australia, and Greece. The top winners will receive visionary fellowships at MIT where they will engage in interdisciplinary discussion about the implementation of their ideas.

The Department's "Regional Planning" initiative, headed by Professor Karen R. Polenske, continues to emphasize spatial planning. Faculty members and post-docs in this track are active in raising research funding related to regional planning issues in the United States, Brazil, China, Italy, and other countries, as indicated under the Research Funding section below.

Professor Polenske has given numerous talks during the past year, including the China Planning Network conference in Beijing, August 2007, the Metallurgical Coke Summit in Chicago in October, and the ACSP conference in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. During the spring term, Professor Polenske was on sabbatical and in addition to working on a new book on the global commodity markets, she gave many lectures abroad, including several in Brazil and three universities in Italy. She also was one of the keynote speakers at the 10th Uddevalla Symposium in Kyoto Japan in May, giving a talk on "Infrastructure Implications of Recycling Industrial Land for Urban Redevelopment in China." In June, Professor Polenske was chair of the session on "Emergence of Private Land and Housing Markets in Transition Economies" at the Lincoln Institute Annual International Conference. Professor Polenske also received two major awards during the past year (see details under awards).

Ralph Gakenheimer is completing the preparation of an edited book with Professor Harry Dimitriou (University College, London) on Urban Transportation in the Developing World. He is also participating in the development of an MIT seminar on Energy and Global Warming, and working with Professors Vale, Frenchman, and Marks to help create a new "University for Urban Health" for the Bangkok Metropolitan Administration in Thailand.

Last summer, Alice Amsden published Escape from Empire: The Developing World's Journey through Heaven and Hell (MIT Press, 2007). The book draws on her research, fieldwork, and analysis of international economic policies to argue that the more freedom a developing country has to determine its own policies, the faster its economy will grow. Her book was chosen as the gift that was presented to 2008 MIT commencement speaker Muhammed Yunus.

Professor Amsden also offered three courses over the year in the International Development Group: "The Analytics of the City," "Economic Development and Technological Capabilities," and "Economic Development and Policy Analysis," drawing examples from both advanced and developing countries.

Annette Kim and Lynn Fisher teamed up to offer a two-part course in "Comparative Housing Issues." The first half of the course concentrated on the economic theory and analysis of housing markets, while the second half put these theories and tools into practice through comparative case studies from advanced and developing countries.

Susan Murcott (based in Course I) again offered a class on "Water and Sanitation Infrastructure in Developing Countries." The course covered the principles of infrastructure planning in developing countries, with a focus on appropriate and sustainable technologies for water and sanitation. Visiting Prof. Gerardo del Cerro offered a course in "Cities, Regional Restructuring, and Globalization."

Working with Balakrishnan Rajagopal, Associate Professor of Law and Development and Director of the MIT Program on Human Rights and Justice, a team of DUSP students in this Spring's practicum class on "Human Rights in India: Dalits and Sustainable Sanitation" prepared an extensive report and recommendations designed to end the practice of "manual scavenging" (the manual cleaning, handling, and carrying of human excreta, a pervasive practice in India despite its detrimental implications for health and human rights). Students undertook a pilot project in one village in Gujarat, with the notion that if strategies for eliminating manual scavenging could be developed there, they could be spread and scaled-up to eliminate the practice more universally.

Professor Zegras taught the core quantitative reasoning class for Master's students, a class on integrated transportation and land use planning, and Practicum on Mexico City (with Prof. Davis). His current research includes a project examining the influence of gated communities on travel behavior in Santiago de Chile, and the travel behavior and residential preferences of "leading edge baby boomers" (55 to 65 year olds) in the United States (see "Transportation," below, for more details on some of this work).

Professor Judith Tendler continued her comparative research project in various states of Brazil focusing on the rule of law, economic development, and the modernization of the State in Brazil. The project builds on the results of her four prior research projects in Brazil, looking across a set of cases conflict resolution. Professor Tendler continues her research relationship with the Institute of Development Studies at the University of Sussex, including with its Centre for the Future State, where she is also a member of the Centre's Advisory Review Group (CARG) along with its funder, the UK's Department of International Development (DfID). She continued to offer her course in "Political Economy of Development Projects: Targeting the Poor," which links poverty-reduction programs to current thinking about poverty, economic development, politics, and the reform of government, as well as "Analyzing Projects and Organizations."

Professor Bish Sanyal's activities are described below in the "International Connection" section of this report.

Urban Information Systems (UIS)

UIS research and teaching continues to examine and shape the growing impact of information and communications technologies (ICT) on urban planning, metropolitan governance, and our sense of community. ICT has greatly facilitated the capacity to study neighborhood-scale planning interventions and to understand and model the key factors that influence urban spatial structure and use patterns. Advances in information technologies have also enabled the location and spatial interaction of people, buildings, and events to be tracked, modeled, visualized, and manipulated as never before. The result has been a rapid growth of new opportunities and risks.

Some UIS-related research has already been described above under the various program groups and centers. These include the MIT@Lawrence work with community groups on urban revitalization and the SENSEable City Lab work on the social networking and urban design implications of mobile technologies in urban environments served with high densities of sensors. In addition, UIS-affiliated faculty have also been researching collaborative information infrastructures for community and metropolitan planning; new models of urban spatial structure and land use and transportation interactions; and improved methods for participatory planning. Most of these projects have involved Master's students, UROPs, and Ph.D. students, and several have provided the "real world" context and partners for class projects, workshops, and seminars.

In February, researchers and designers from the "Senseable City" lab, headed by Professor Carlo Ratti, participated in a show at New York's Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), entitled "Design and the Elastic Mind." The group's submission, "New York Talk Exchange," used computer visualizations and real-time urban data to reveal the complex dynamics of talk that exist between New York and other cities around the globe.

Students in the Professor Karen R. Polenske's "Regional Socioeconomic Impact Analysis and Modeling" class presented their final projects to Boston Development Authority (BRA) officials. Research included projects on "The Urban Ring in Context" and "Green Building."

Transportation

In January, DUSP students and faculty presented in several sessions at the 2008 Transportation Research Board conference, in Washington DC. The sessions included work by Professor Chris Zegras and a number of current and past students, including Tegin Teich (sustainable transportation in Chihuahua, Mexico), Frank Hebbert (analyzing travel mode decisions in aging communities), and Francesca Napolitan (urban freeway removal), and David Block-Schachter (with John Attanuchi in the Center for Transportation and Logistics, on travel strategies for MIT in response to rising parking costs).

Professor Chris Zegras continues his ongoing research into the travel behavior of older adults in suburban residential communities. Working with Professor Eran Ben-Joseph and Joe Coughlin at the MIT Agelab, the team examined aging baby boomers' travel behavior and neighborhood design preferences in four different urban edge neighborhoods in the Boston metropolitan area.

Motivated by the problem of rising costs for parking subsidies on campus, and eager to create a more sustainable policy for their institution, a group of DUSP and MST graduate students and faculty participated in special studies course, resulting in a proposal to help control costs for the University and increase the use of public transportation to campus.

Graduate Degree Program Enrollment and Activities

The Department's graduate programs enrolled 68 new MCP students, 3 new SM students, and 8 new doctoral students this year. Of the total (185 students in the department) 52% were women, 34% were international students, and 15% of U.S. domestic students were underrepresented minorities. The Department granted 65 MCP, 2 SM, and 13 Ph.D. degrees.

MCP Committee Activities

The MCP Committee continued to focus on ways to improve thesis advising, revisions to the required "Gateway" class, expanded use of on-line modules, and changes to material sent to incoming students. By the end of the semester the Committee also began working on changes to the Quantitative Reasoning Requirement and the introductory class on Geographic Information Systems.

Ph.D. Committee Activities

The Ph.D. Committee fully implemented the revised structure of the general exam with set schedule and modified first fields. Each of the approved six fields (City Design and Development; International Economic Development; Urban Information Systems; Public Policy and Politics; Urban and Regional Economics; and Urban Sociology) are now fully integrated with sets of required readings and classes. The Committee also implemented two web based tools, a wiki and a stellar site to facilitate communication and resources related to curriculum, procedures and professional development.

The committee continued its effort to advocate and allocate for financial resources and to make sure that admitted students would indeed enroll in our program. The Fall 2008 incoming class will be our largest in some time, with 17 students expected to enroll. Finally, the Committee continued its support of a regular, once a week, afternoon social gathering for Ph.D. students and faculty, and the arrangement of two "town hall" meetings to discuss issues and ideas.

The Department continued to publish Projections, the Journal of the MIT Department of Urban Studies and Planning. The Spring 2008 issue (Projections 7: "Institutional Innovations for Development," edited by Rajendra Kumar, Anjali Mahendra, and Georgeta Vidican (Ph.D. 2008), was published in May, 2008. The student editorial team has completed Projections 8 ("Justice and Sustainability as a Framework for Planning and Action", edited by Isabelle Anguelovski, Anna Livia Brand, and Rachel Healy), which is due to be published this summer. An editorial team has been appointed for Projections 9 and papers are currently being reviewed. The editors also established a Projections seminar and film series, which ran through the 2007-2008 academic year.

Undergraduate Program Activities

During 2007-2008 the Undergraduate Committee continued to work on raising the visibility of DUSP among MIT's undergraduates. Eight freshmen declared an Urban Studies and Planning major this year (down from a high of 11 in the previous year, but still part of an overall upward trend).

Now in its second year, the Cityscope class brought ten undergraduate students to Peru for a project-based introduction to Tambo de Mora, a town recovering from a devastating earthquake. Taught by J. Phillip Thompson (DUSP), John Fernandez (Architecture), and Cherie Abbanat (DUSP), students worked on a number of different projects including plans to help rebuild with different materials that may be better suited to this earthquake prone region, micro businesses development, and a video and story-telling project to document local history.

Another major attraction of DUSP for undergraduates is the City to City subject, taught by Cherie Abbanat. This year 8 students traveled to Florence, Italy, to compare urban design, architecture, and city planning issues and problems there to those found in Boston.

Professor Robert Fogelson continued to offer his two-semester course in American Urban History, introducing students to the physical, social, architectural, and economic history of cities, ranging from political machines, police departments, courts, schools, prisons, and universities, to parks, zoos, housing, suburban development, downtowns, and skyscrapers. He also offered his long-running courses in "Riots, Strikes, and Conspiracies in American History," and "Downtown."

Anne Beamish's "Big Plans" course explored social, technological, political, economic, and cultural implications of large-scale planning in the urban context. Local and international case studies (such as Boston's Central Artery and Curitiba, Brazil's bus transit system) were used to understand the process of making major changes to the city fabric.

Over the coming summer, the Department will participate for the first time ever in MIT's Freshmen Pre-Orientation Program (FPOP), offering a three-day session to "Discovering Urban Studies and Planning," designed by Judith Layzer and Ezra Glenn. We expect that this will project lead to increased interest in the major among undergraduates.

Student Awards

Our students received a large number of awards this year from the Institute, national and international organizations, and the Department.

Departmental Awards

MIT Awards

National/International Awards

Outreach to Alumni/Alumnae

Local alumni/ae continued to play an active role in sponsoring internships for students, providing career advice at the alumni/ae career forums organized by each of the program groups and participating as guest lecturers in numerous classes. Alumni/ae across the country offered summer positions for current students and served as employers for recent graduates. Alumni/ae also participated on a key discussion panel in Orientation for incoming students in August 2007. They continue to play a role in the implementation of the Practicum requirement, a significant element in the revised MCP core curriculum.

As mentioned earlier, the Department celebrated the 75th anniversary of the Course in City Planning at MIT, which provided multiple opportunities to connect with alumni (including a special evening reception for the 25th anniversary MCP class of 1983).

The Department Head continued his regularly monthly alumni emails, which included information from around the Department as well as School-wide activities and news updates.

In Fall 2007, alumni/ae again assisted in DUSP student recruitment efforts by joining faculty and current students at Open Houses in Atlanta and San Francisco, as well as other graduate school recruitment events around the country. The Department also hosted receptions at the annual conferences for both the American Planning Association (Las Vegas) and the Association of Collegiate Schools of Planning (Milwaukee), which provided venues to catch up with alumni/ae from across the country.

The Department's website (dusp.mit.edu) was significantly redesigned by Duncan Kincaid, and now includes a section dedicated to alumni news, as well as more current news posting and calendar items to keep alumni involved in events both on and off campus. The DUSP Career Resources Website continues to serve alumni/ae as well as current students in terms of continued professional development, as well as meeting their needs as potential employers of DUSP students and graduates.

In June Professor Ralph Gakenheimer addressed the MIT Alumn(i/ae) Association of Latin America in Cancun Mexico. Alumni/ae once again participated as panelists in each of the four annual Alumni/ae Career Forums associated with each of the Department's four Program Groups, i.e. City Design and Development, Environmental Policy and Planning, Housing and Community Economic Development and the International Development Group.

The Department proudly presented the sixth annual Excellence in Public Service Awards to Christine Gaspar (MCP 2004) and Carrie Grassi (MCP 2006).

The Department is currently working with several alumni in New York City to organize a two-part symposium in Fall 2008, which would bring together current students and New York alumni/ae first on campus and then on location in New York City.

International Connection

In addition to being the 75th Anniversary of the City Planning Course at MIT, this year marked the 40th anniversary of the Special Program in Urban and Regional Planning (SPURS) and the. In its 40-year history, SPURS has hosted more than 550 mid-career professionals from more than 90 countries in Latin America, Asia, Africa, the Middle East, and Eastern and Central Europe. SPURS alumni/ae hold senior level positions in both the public and private sectors in their countries.

To commemorate the SPURS 40th and DUSP 75th anniversaries, the theme for this year's Monday Seminar Series was "The History of Planning Ideas." The Department invited top academics and practitioners in urban planning to discuss how ideas in planning take shape and move across time and context. The broad objective of the series was to explore the trajectories of powerful planning ideas in an increasingly interconnected world, and also understand the roles of individuals and institutions, including governments, business firms, professional groups, universities, and civil society groups in framing planning problems and ideas. The series speakers included academics and prominent public intellectuals: Gary Hack, June Manning Thomas, Neil Brenner, Mohammad Qadeer, Merilee Grindle, Lynne Sagalyn, Niraj Verma, Timothy Beatley, Raphael Fischler, Robert Fishman, Patsy Healey, Bob Yaro, and Michael Teitz. Their papers will be published in an edited volume edited by Bish Sanyal, Lawrence Vale, and Christina Rosan.

In addition, we have created a SPURS Advisory Committee composed of top-ranking MIT professors with an interest in international development and education. The purpose of the Advisory Committee is to further strengthen SPURS, raise its intellectual profile, and help develop innovative projects that engage our alumni/ae in an on-going relationship with each other and with MIT. By including members of the MIT faculty from all Schools in the governance of SPURS, we are able to think creatively about the types of linkages that can be made between SPURS and the rest of MIT.

In 2007-2008, SPURS hosted 16 mid-career Fellows from around the world. Eleven of the Fellows participated in SPURS as part of the Hubert H. Humphrey Program sponsored by the U.S. Department of State. The SPURS/Humphrey Fellows represented 14 countries: Malawi, China, Korea, Brazil, Colombia, Bhutan, India, Nepal, Palestine, Iran, Guatemala, Azerbaijan, Nepal, Mexico, and Paraguay. Their research interests covered a variety of areas, including transportation planning and policy, technological development and policy, urban development, public-private partnerships, geographical information systems, and environmental policy.

Our Fellows continue to build strong connections with MIT undergraduates, particularly through our relationships with the International House and Simmons Hall. As a result, two MIT undergraduate students are spending the summer teaching science to high school students in Paraguay and helping to design a better science and technology curriculum for Paraguayan schools. In addition, a Humphrey Fellow, Angela Mjojo, received $2,000 from MIT's Public Service Center to help start a computer lab in Malawi. Another MIT undergraduate is spending the summer working in Malawi on development projects through Angela's connections.

SPURS continues to collaborate with the mid-career Loeb Fellows of Harvard at the Graduate School of Design. The relationship between the two groups of mid-career fellows provides an opportunity for shared learning and comparison between domestic and international approaches to urban planning.

In April the Department hosted a delegation of planning educators from the Ha Noi Architectural University in Vietnam interested in learning from American models for planning education. The visit was coordinated by the University of Hawai'i at Manoa.

Professors Diane Davis and Chris Zegras returned to Mexico City for another year of this practicum class. Students interested in urban development participated in a wide range of policy and research projects related to transportation and urban planning.

During the January IAP session, Visiting Scholar Anat Biletzki will offer a case-study course on Human Rights in the Middle East.

Community Partnerships

As mentioned in the "Highlights" section, this year saw the successful launch of the "Community Innovators Lab," an outgrowth of the Center for Reflective Community Practice which focuses on urban community partnerships. Its work explores technological infrastructure and community information systems as intrinsic components of that research agenda. CoLab brings research in reflective practice to community work to effect social change, and brings community practitioners to MIT to enrich the learning environment for students and faculty. CoLab uses community-based knowledge, academic resources, and information technologies as tools to transform community development practice.

Working through CoLab and the Department's Practicum Committee, students and faculty have worked on client-based projects for communities around Massachusetts (Lawrence, Springfield, Lowell), as well as hurricane-affected areas in the Gulf Coast (Biloxi, New Orleans) and earthquake-ravaged Peru.

An emerging CoLab project, the Black Intensive Civic Engagement Project (BICEP), seeks to strengthen traditional voter registration/GOTV efforts by working with local and national groups to make connections between short-term voter registration efforts and the more long-term work of building black civic capacity and engagement. CoLab works with a select group of community and national organizations to structure an ongoing discursive process that enables activists to collectively develop a deeper critique of current circumstances and a language to capture what is happening in black communities as a whole.

Another CoLab effort, "MarketShare," improves the ability of NGOs to use market mechanisms to support comprehensive community transformation and increase resources available to sustain democratic involvement over time. Poor people have access to a wealth of assets that rarely are considered among the resources available for social change. With the right brokering/partnerships many of these assets could be developed to build sustainable organizations and begin using market tools to directly address market failures. In partnership with key Ford Foundation-supported community groups, CoLab and DUSP faculty are now developing a set of multi-year practica to explore collaborations that create new business models to address these issues and generate sustainable streams of resources for community engagement.

In addition to its work with communities, CoLab supports opportunities for leading community practitioners to attend seminars at MIT to learn how to bring reflection into their work. CoLab also works with grant-making organizations to promote learning practices with grantees working to effect community change.

A joint MIT/Washington University in St. Louis student team was awarded first place in the JP Morgan Chase Community Development Competition for their work with the Good Work Network in New Orleans. The students in Lecturer Karl Seidman's "Financing Economic Development" (11.437) worked with their non-profit client to create a development plan to reuse the historic Franz Building in Central City as a non-profit business incubator. The award came with a $25,000 prize, to be used as seed money to get started on the proposed $2.1 million renovation. Two DUSP students, Lakshmi Sridaran and Holly Jo Sparks, represented MIT on the team.

Research Funding

Faculty and staff raised $3,117,834 in new sponsored funds for research and other projects in fiscal 2008.

Professor Lawrence Susskind, in collaboration with Dr. Herman Karl, Visiting Lecturer from the U.S. Geological Survey, raised $204,370 from the USGS and other federal agencies for continued support of the MIT-USGS Science Impact Collaborative (MUSIC) program.

Carlo Ratti, Director of the SENSEable City Lab and Associate Professor of the Practice, raised an initial $150,000 as part of a new consortium supporting activities of the Lab. This year one of the main projects supported was the Digital Water Pavilion at the Expo in Zaragoza, Spain. AT&T Foundation granted $150,000 in support of the "New York Talk Exchange" project, an installation in the "Design and the Elastic Mind" exhibit in the Museum of Modern Art in New York. Prof. Ratti as Co-PI was granted $253,967 through the MIT-Portugal Program from the Portuguese Science and Technology Foundation. He also serves as Co-PI on an NSF project administered through LIDS entitled "Foundations for Reconfigurable and Autonomous Cyber-Physical System, Cyber-Cities and Cyber-Universities," with an award of $43,498 for his portion of that project.

Dayna Cunningham, Executive Director of the Community Innovators Lab, CoLab (previously the Center for Reflective Community Practice), received a series of three grants from the Ford Foundation totaling $1,150,000, supporting the "Black Intensive Civic Engagement, Supporting Participatory and Inclusive Neighborhood Rebuilding in New Orleans," and "MarketShare" projects. The Nathan Cummings Foundation awarded two grants to CoLab, $100,000 for the "ORM/MIT Partnership: Greening New Orleans," and $100,000 for the "MIT Green Hub" project. The Lord Foundation awarded $50,000 for the "Green Hub Executive Education Program," and the Marguerite Casey Foundation awarded $50,000 for the project entitled "Supporting a Movement of Low Income Families."

Professor Eric Klopfer, Director of the Teacher Education Program, was awarded six grants in FY08, totaling $696,511: The Hewlett Foundation awarded a grant of $200,000 for a project entitled "Exploring International Game-Based Language Learning;" Fablevision granted $70,000 for the Children's Hospital Trust Website project; SimBiotic Software granted $58,511 for Evo Beaker II: Assessing Simulations for Teaching Evolutionary Biology; the Missouri Botanical Garden provided a grant of $125,000 for "LIONS: Local Investigations of Natural Science;" the Columbus Zoo and Aquarium continued the project on "Augmented Reality" with an additional $80,000; and Batelle-Pacific Northwest Labs granted $163,000 for the "DHS Centers Science in Middle School STEM Education" project.

Professor Karen Polenske received a grant of $100,000 from BP Technology Ventures, Inc., through the MIT Energy Initiative, for her project entitled "Climate Change & China Regional Energy-Intensity Trends."

Professor Eran Ben-Joseph received a sub-award of $19,488 from Purdue University on an NIH grant entitled "Exploratory Study of Environmental Effects on Activity/Overweight in Older Women."

Professors Dennis Frenchman and Chris Zegras were awarded $50,000 from BP Technology Ventures, Inc. through the MIT Energy Initiative for a project entitled "China Urban Design Studios."

Other Funding

Principal Research Scientist Thomas J. Piper raised $100,000 of additional funding from various sponsors for the project "FutureBoston: What Next for Boston in the First Decades of the 21st Century."

Professor Phillip Thompson raised $40,000 from the MIT Provost's Office in support of a concept paper on Green Cities Innovation.

Carlo Ratti received a gift of $71,000 in support of the work of the SENSEable City Lab.

Sincerely,

Lawrence J. Vale

Department Head and Professor of Urban Studies and Planning

 

• 2009-01-13 14:03:20 •