Established in 1979 through an endowment from His Highness the Aga Khan, The Aga Khan Program for Islamic Architecture (AKPIA) at MIT is dedicated to the study of Islamic architecture, urbanism, environmental and landscape design, and conservation.
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.
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.
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 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 Civic Data Design Lab works with data to understand it for Public Good. We seek to develop alternative practices which can make the work we do with data and images richer, smarter, more relevant, and more responsive to the needs and interested of citizens traditionally on the margins of policy development.
The MIT Community Innovators Lab (CoLab) supports faculty and students to work with low-income and excluded people around the world, tapping their energy, creativity, and in-depth knowledge of the issues they face to tackle poverty, climate change, and mass urbanization. Launched in 2007, CoLab is a platform for faculty and student collaboration on field-based projects working with departments, laboratories, and centers across the Institute, supporting action research, while providing important resources to community leaders.
Our Mission
A research initiative that focuses on collaborative approaches, leveraging various analog and digital data collection and analysis tools, to mobilize a collective intelligence towards improved mobility conditions in a range of contexts around the world. We work with partners from around MIT and around the world, including: Megacities Logistics Laboratory, Intelligent Transportation Lab, TransitLab, BRT COE, SMART-FM, just to name a few. Learn more here.
The Organization for Permanent Modernity 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.
P-REX is a groundbreaking design research lab developing non-traditional design solutions to push the boundaries of conventional practice and incorporate resilient thinking into large-scale strategic planning & design.
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 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.