MIT founded the Center for Real Estate (CRE)  in 1983 to improve the quality of the built environment and to promote more informed professional practice in the global real estate industry. Educating the men and women whose innovations will serve the industry worldwide, the CRE is a home to the first-ever one year Master of Science in Real Estate Development (MSRED) degree, as well as an integrated suite of professional development courses.

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 AgeLab invent new ideas and creatively translate technologies into practical solutions that improve people’s healthand enable them to “do things” throughout the lifespan. Equal to the need for ideas and new technologies is the belief that innovations in how products are designed, services are delivered, or policies are implemented are of critical importance to our quality of life tomorrow.

Ecologic Oriented Development (EOD) research centers on sustainable community design and ideal residential housing from a global perspective in order to accumulate new insights and technical expertise that can be utilized in future development.

The Platform for a Permanent Modernity (PPM) investigates operational templates of public form that integrate architecture, infrastructure, and landscape into elements of a lasting territorial order. Its hypothesis entails the possibility of a public reading of the territory through forms of permanence, while accommodating uncertainty and change within and around these interventions.

The West Philadelphia Landscape Project (WPLP), founded in 1987, is an action research program that links community development and environmental restoration. Among the key discoveries of the project is the high correlation between buried floodplains and vacant land in inner city neighborhoods.

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.

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.

The Project for Reclamation Excellence, is a sustained effort to understand, represent and design reclaimed environments associated with large-scale natural resource extraction. P-REX addresses the challenges of landscape alteration through unique trans-disciplinary collaborations with engineers, economists, ecologists, geologists, and policy experts.