The 2018-2019 DUSP Thesis/Dissertation Abstracts booklet, which provides a glimpse at the diverse set of challenges, phenomena, and opportunities studied by DUSP alumni from the 2018-2019 academic year, is now available via the link on the right and online viewing via issuu.
At the Departmental Commencement Celebration on June 6, 2019, DUSP was pleased to welcome back Ambassador Paul Altidor (SM 2004) as our Commencement Speaker. Ambassador Altidor served as the Ambassador at Embassy of the Republic of Haiti in Washington D.C. from May 2nd, 2012 until March 2nd, 2019. During his seven-year tenure, Ambassador Altidor oversaw a three-year renovation project of the Embassy to increase access and create a more welcoming space, redefined Haiti’s public diplomacy with the United States, and streamlined services offered to Haitian citizens.
Reposted from SA+P's May 16th MIT News Story
MIT and KTH Royal Institute of Technology, Sweden’s leading technological and engineering university, have announced a research collaboration focused on urban planning and development in Stockholm, Sweden.
In an era of increased power and influence of private actors, rather than nation-states, private charities, often-faith based institutions, are increasingly responsible for delivering humanitarian and development assistance. What governing ethics and politics inform how these organizations deliver assistance? And should we be concerned with the nature of faith-based private institutions, if they are capable of quickly mobilizing and reaching individuals outside the scope of influence of nation-state governance?
On Friday, April 29th 2019, Masters of City Planning (MCP) candidates: Margaret Dunne, Yael Nidam, and Kavya Vaghul, were honored as members of the 2019 MIT Graduate Women of Excellence. Dunne, Nidam, and Vaghul were selected from over 200 nominees for their leadership, mentoring of fellow MIT students, community building efforts, and service contributions to the Institute. Graduate Women of Excellence is a biennial event hosted by the MIT Office of Graduate Education that showcases and celebrates the work of honorees.
Conflicts in our current industrialized state allow glimpses of underlying sustainability challenges, that many argue are inherit byproducts of capitalism, globalization, and consumerism. From resource depletion; toxic pollution; climate disruption; eco-system destruction; disproportionate and unequal burdens of environmental impacts; and widening disparities in employment opportunities as well as earning capacity and economic inequality, the challenges are myriad and synergistic.
Reposted from MIT New's April 22nd, 2019 Story.
Candid discussions about race relations are vital at a time of “pushback” against social diversity in the U.S., said Beverly Daniel Tatum, the former president of Spelman College, in a talk at MIT on Thursday.
On March 14th 2019, the Community Economic Development Assistance Corporation (CEDAC) honored Mel King at its 40th anniversary celebration at the MIT Samberg Conference Center. King -- a community organizer, former State Representative, and Professor Emeritus at the Department of Urban Studies and Planning -- crafted the state legislation that created CEDAC in 1978. CEDAC is a community development financial institution providing financing and technical assistance to community-based and other non-profit community development organizations in Massachusetts.
A redevelopment plan for a Cincinnati site presented by a team from MIT and Harvard University has won the 2019 Urban Land Institute (ULI) Hines Student Competition. The annual ideas competition invites graduate students to devise a comprehensive design and development scheme for a large-scale urban site.
Reposted from MIT New's April 9th, 2019 Story.
MIT’s vibrant entrepreneurial ecosystem has inspired another first: a new seed fund established to support startups launched from School of Architecture and Planning (SA+P) innovation accelerator MITdesignX.
The Boston-based MET Fund, an independent legal entity unaffiliated with MIT, has been formed to provide support to qualified ventures that have completed the MITdesignX program.
On February 14th 2019 – Valentine’s Day—members of the DUSP alumni/ae community gathered in Washington D.C. to celebrate a different kind of love; their love of the MIT community as well as sharing their ideas and work. DUSPx: MIT Connections was the sixth in a series of annual ‘DUSPx’ events that support, grow, and promote connections among DUSP alumni as well as with the current DUSP students and faculty.
Resposted from Bridget E. Begg's March 21, 2019 MIT News Story
Dasjon Jordan’s classmates call him the mayor of New Orleans.
By 2050, the United Nations estimates that 86% of the developed world’s population will live in urban areas. Currently, low wage, full-time employment fails to provide adequate income to affordably rent market-rate housing in almost any large American city, yet only one in four renters receives a housing subsidy. Further reinforcing structural challenges for the poor, more than a quarter of low-income American renters spend more than half of their household wages on housing costs.
The Harold Horowitz (1951) Student Research Fund, established in 1999 through the generosity of alumnus Harold Horowitz (AR ’51), is awarded annually to one or more students - graduate or undergraduate - enrolled in a degree program in the MIT School of Architecture and Planning (SA+P). The fund seeks to support: research assistantships and student-initiated research projects; extraordinary expenses of research for students working on advanced degrees; and costs of publication of research results that are of exceptional merit or importance.
Less than a decade after the conclusion of the U.S. Civil War and the promise of the Reconstruction period, reactionary organizations led violent campaigns to entrench white supremacy and racial segregation. Explicit racial zoning ordinances and Jim Crow laws mandating segregation of public accommodations and excluding African Americans from educational and labor institutions worked in conjunction with mob violence to create an increasingly segregated urban landscape.
On Saturday, Feb. 23, more than 100 middle school students gathered at MIT to compete in the annual Northeast Regional Middle School Science Bowl.
We are now accepting applications for the MIT Department of Urban Studies and Planning "Excellence in Public Service Awards." Deadline: May 1, 2019.
Purpose. In 1999, DUSP established the Fund for Excellence in Public Service to raise funds to assist and encourage graduates from the Master in City Planning (MCP) program who choose to pursue public service careers. The Excellence in Public Service Awards, as the Fund’s first initiative, is designed to advance three purposes:
Eighty percent of Chinatown residents in Boston report housing insecurity - caused primarily by unaffordable rents. In addition, Chinese-American households living in Chinatown spending almost half their monthly income on rent each month.
Yazmin Guzman, a master's student in the Department of Urban Studies and Planning, has won the prestigious Gates Cambridge scholarship, which offers students an opportunity to pursue graduate study in the field of their choice at Cambridge University.
Many locus points of innovation and growth in the United States are heavily regulated and controlled in regards to spatial expansion. As economic prosperity and high earning, highly skilled jobs increase in an urban area, so too do zoning regulations controlling types and levels of growth. These regulations are often associated with a sense by residents that an area has achieved a tipping point where the balance between density and accompanying amenities is in danger of producing urban congestion, with limited additional amenities.
Reposted from David L. Chandler's MIT News Story, posted on February 15, 2019.
In one of the less-remembered passages of Martin Luther King Jr.’s celebrated “I have a dream” speech in 1963, he spoke eloquently about the large debt owed by this country to its black citizens after centuries of oppression — which he described as a bad check that was being returned from the bank of justice, marked “insufficient funds.”
Reposted from School of Architecture and Planning's MIT News Story, available here.
Vibrant, innovative cities most often result from powerful collaborations among diverse constituencies.
Led by two faculty members, a group graduate students and mid-career fellows from MIT’s Department of Urban Studies & Planning (DUSP) and the Special Program for Urban and Regional Studies (SPURS) traveled to Buenos Aires for a week during IAP at the invitation of the Buenos Aires provincial government. Their objective: To conduct an in-depth study on how to integrate informal settlements into the formal urban fabric of Metropolitan Buenos Aires.
Graduate students facing obstacles in their lives turn to their academic advisors more frequently than any other on-campus resource, according to the most recent MIT Enrolled Graduate Student Survey.
In addition to the expected scholarly advice, feedback on research, and letters of recommendation, many graduate students have expressed appreciation for their advisors’ support of their overall wellbeing, as related in numerous nominations for the Committed to Caring (C2C) Award.
The landscapes beneath elevated highway viaducts conjure collective imaginings of danger, foreboding, and forgotten urban space. What if we could leverage clever programing, placemaking, and lighting to transform these overlooked spaces into active spaces for urban residents? Could thoughtful planning also mitigate some of the worse environmental impacts of highways?
Reposted from Helen Knight's MIT News Story, posted on January 21, 2019.
For many years, China has been struggling to tackle high pollution levels that are crippling its major cities. Indeed, a recent study by researchers at Chinese Hong Kong University has found that air pollution in the country causes an average of 1.1 million premature deaths each year and costs its economy $38 billion.
Lisa Peattie, a celebrated scholar and a lifelong activist who was Professor of Urban Anthropology in the Department of Urban Studies and Planning and recipient of the ACSP Distinguished Educator Award, passed away on December 13th, 2018. She was 94.
She was born in Chicago, IL and raised in Illinois, Mexico, and Guatemala. Peattie’s international upbringing, surrounded by her parents’ fieldwork in Morelos and Yucatán, Mexico, nurtured an early interest in the connections across academic disciplines.
We are experiencing unprecedented levels of displacement as conflict and crises fuel what is widely regarded as one of the worst humanitarian crises on record. The United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees estimates 68.5 million individuals are forcibly displaced worldwide -- and nearly 60 percent of these individuals are seeking shelter in urban areas, not refugee camps.
Can we redesign governance to improve public engagement processes - and can we expand our definition of a public to include an increasingly complex and diverse group of individuals and opinions? The Move, a podcast and collaborative learning platform, aims to gather people of all backgrounds seeking to facilitate real civic engagement to support cities, communities, and other institutions in creating the space needed to peacefully struggle and make meaningful progress in a democracy.
