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 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 Leventhal Center for Advanced Urbanism (LCAU) provides a home for faculty interested in collaborative research projects that will engage student participation. LCAU 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 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 China Future City Lab addresses challenges and issues related to urbanization in China; we mobilize the vision, research expertise, experience, talent, creativity, and other resources of MIT to identify innovative concepts and develop novel tools, technologies, and solutions that are applicable to the obstacles and opportunities in China’s growing cities. The China Future City Lab is hosted at the MIT Department of Urban Studies and Planning.
For more than twenty-five years, the West Philadelphia Landscape Project (WPLP) has worked in the Mill Creek watershed and neighborhood. Our mission is to restore nature and rebuild community through strategic design, planning, and education projects. Through our experience in Mill Creek, we seek to demonstrate how to create human settlements that are healthier, economical to build and maintain, more resilient, more beautiful, and more just.