These are difficult and unprecedented times for all of us. Yet, unprecedented times lead to unprecedented gestures - large and small. They call for unprecedented sacrifices. They also force us to remember to step back, take a breath, be thankful, and build from what we have to make something better.
As climate change threatens to make cities hotter and wetter, not all cities or even neighborhoods within a city will be impacted equally. What do many of the most vulnerable urban communities have in common? During the 1930s and 1940s, these neighborhoods were intentionally segregated via federal redlining policies. Deemed “too risky” for investment because of the race or national origin of its residents, these neighborhoods were intentionally and systemically denied access to federally backed mortgages.
Repost of Peter Dizikes' March 9, 2020 MIT News Story, available here.
Suppose you would like to know mortality rates for women during childbirth, by country, around the world. Where would you look? One option is the WomanStats Project, the website of an academic research effort investigating the links between the security and activities of nation-states, and the security of the women who live in them.
With developments in technology and access, generation of geospatial content is shifting from professional and governmental actors to informal, non-professionals using the mapping systems and satellite imagery available on the internet. The content that these actors produce is labeled as Volunteered Geographic Information (VGI), which has facilitated the expansion of mapping into previously difficult or inaccessible areas.
On Wednesday, February 12th, 2020 a cadre of MIT community members were recognized with Martin Luther King Jr. Leadership Awards for their efforts to cultivate integrity, leadership, and creativity at MIT. Recipients included Dayna Cunningham, who is the Executive Director of the Community Innovators Lab (CoLab) and a lecturer at the Department of Urban Studies and Planning (DUSP).
This is an abridged version of the essay, ‘Working for a Just Adaptation’ by Zachary B. Lamb and Todd E. Vachon. The original, full version of this essay is available on the website for “Power: Infrastructure in America,” a project at Columbia University’s Temple Hoyne Buell Center for the Study of American Architecture.
Rivers have and continue to play fundamental roles in the selection of a site for the emergence of a new city and the development of the urban fabric after a city is established. During an accelerated era of industrialization and urbanization starting in the mid-eighteenth century and continuing into today, many cities brought rivers under the will of planners and engineers, bent and reshaped to better serve the cityscape and its citizens. However, after decades of deterioration or neglect, urban waterways across the world are being rediscovered, repurposed, and restored.
In November 2019, a group of over 11,000 scientists declared that the planet Earth is facing a climate emergency. The declaration was published in the journal BioScience (Oxford University Press), highlighting that despite a series of previous warnings from the scientific community, greenhouse gas emissions continue to rapidly rise and the scale of the required collective effort continues to expand, if we are to conserve the Earth’s biosphere.
China’s urbanization efforts, starting in 1980s, has changed the lives of millions of Chinese nationals, while also altering the world’s political, economic, and environmental landscapes. The MIT China Future City Lab (CFC), a research lab led by Siqi Zheng in the Department of Urban Studies and Planning and Center for Real Estate, focuses on uniting academia, government, entrepreneurs, and industry together to address complex challenges presented by urbanization in China.
Repost of the School of Architecture and Planning's December 11th, 2019 MIT News Story.
Inspired by the question “What are the problems our cities must confront?”, faculty, students, and alumni from the MIT School of Architecture and Planning participated in the 2019 Seoul Biennale of Architecture and Urbanism, which ran from September 7 to November 10, 2019.