70-mile long, 300 feet wide rift in the Larsen C ice shelf in Antarctica. Image credit: NASA, November 2016

In the final Finance, Geography, and Sustainability Speaker Series, guest speaker, Elvin Wyly, Professor of Geography at the University of British Columbia and DUSP's own Professor Amy Glasmeier delve into the evolution of the noösphere, the sphere of human thought, magnified by the interconnectivity of the internet and the proliferation of bot technology, and what this means for traditional partnerships and value inspired political beliefs.

What effect do localized, carefully designed, serious games have on their participants's actions inside their community? Can they be used as a public policy and planning tool to change the course of history in particular locations?

Answers to these questions and more in our newest DUSP Faculty Video, featuring Professor Lawrence Susskind and a discussion of the use of Role Play Simulation in the field of planning.

In the final panel of the Finance, Geography, and Sustainability Workshops, Sandra Waddock, Professor of Management and the Galligan Chair of Strategy in the Carroll School of Corporate Responsibility at Boston College, as well as Karen Lai, Assistant Professor at the Department of Geography at the National University of Singapore delve into the outcomes of the neoliberal shaping of our economic narrative and metrics. What alternative emerging paradigms might encompass economy, society, and nature?

In the second panel of the final day of the Finance, Geography, and Sustainability Workshops, Gerald Epstein, Professor of Economics at the University of Massachusetts Amherst and Sabine Döerry, Senior Research Fellow at the Luxembourg Institute of Socio-Economic Research and Adjunct Associate Professor at the University of Luxembourg, discuss the shift in the practice of banking that allowed for the 2007-2008 financial crisis, the calculated costs of this modern style of banking, and possible methods for curtailing the extremes and mitigating the risks it creates.

In the first panel of the second day of the Finance, Geography, and Sustainability Workshops, Gordon Clark, Professor of Economic Geography and the director of the @Smith School of Enterprise and the Environment at University of Oxford, with Aniket Shah, Program Leader of Financing for the UN Sustainable Development Solutions Network, and Eric Knight, Associate Professor of Innovation and Management at the University of Sydney Business School, analyze the challenges and opportunities to leverage institutional investors participation in innovative markets.

In the sixth panel of presenters for the Finance, Geography and Sustainability Workshops, Katharina Pistor, Professor of Law at Columbia Law School and Justin Steil, Assistant Professor of Law and Urban Planning at MIT discuss the legal structures which support our financial markets, as well as the inherent paradox between legal and financial constructions. They continue by examining the changes and interplay between these systems with the shift towards digitization of both finance and law.

In the fourth panel of presenters for the Finance, Geography and Sustainability Workshops, Elke Weber, Professor in Energy and the Environment and Professor of Psychology and Public Affairs at Princeton University and Lawrence Susskind, Ford Professor or Urban and Environmental Planning at MIT discuss how individuals construction and measure risks, and how an understanding of these feelings of risk can be applied to climate change decisions.

In the second presenters of the Finance, Geography and Sustainability Workshops, Deborah Frieze founder of the Boston Impact Initiative and DUSP's Ceasar McDowell explore an alternative, place based investments focused of social justice, represented in this presentation by the Boston Ujima Project and Boston based CERO cooperative. Watch this fascinating presentation to learn how a community controlled economy can steer successful investments and achieve triple bottom lines.

If you missed the Workshops, this video is now available via the DUSP YouTube Channel here:

In the first presenters of the Finance, Geography and Sustainability Workshops, David Weil from Boston University Questrom School of Business and Caitlin McElroy from the Smith School of Enterprise and the Environment at Oxford University delve into the growing intensity and frequency of fissured workplaces across a spectrum of labor fields, the consequences of these organizational structures, and possible policy actions to mitigate the worst consequences.

The military demands of World War II had a profound effect on both farming and eating in America. The demands on the domestic supply of food for soldiers was unprecedented, with troops in 23 different climatic zones internationally dependent on American supplies. The U.S. was also supplying food to the Allies, another huge demand on domestic supplies. The war created several surprising challenges to American food production and diet.

On Wednesday March 22, Janelle Knox-Hayes hosted the second Finance, Geography, and Sustainability Speaker Series featuring guest speaker Anat Admanti from the Stanford Graduate School of Business and DUSP's own Gabriella Carolini.

The recording of the Speaker Series is available now (the recording of Gabriella's response is forthcoming).

Higher education has often been a catalyst in driving both national and global innovation and sweeping shifts in cultural norms. Today, MIT seeks to transform our campus in yet another demonstration of MIT's ability to marshal knowledge in addressing the world's great challenges. Today we seek to develop a vision for a Sustainable Campus that is uniquely grounded in the trans-disciplinary, problem-solving ethos of the MIT culture, yet uniquely shaped by its integration with the City of Cambridge and service to the world.

Currently, how does this spatiality of power interact with law, planning, policy, and the responsibilities of academics? What are the implications of this interaction for housing in the United States?

We are pleased to bring you the next DUSP Faculty Video, featuring Assistant Professor Justin Steil.

Bioenergy has entered the renewable energy strategy for addressing climate change. It contributes the largest fraction of renewable energy world wide, and is 60% of the renewable portfolio in the European Union. Can we actually claim bioenergy is carbon neutral? If not, what are the actual costs behind the normative accounting of bioenergy emissions and who is accountable for the added greenhouse gases?

In a new DUSP Faculty Video, Associate Professor Janelle Knox-Hayes discusses the nature and the limitations of markets when examined in at the local level. For example, how do different countries frame their climate change policy? Is their understanding rooted in a narrative of economic incentives, issues of morality, or perhaps as a security issue? How do differing and diverse perceptions affect their interactions with market apparatus aimed at controlling climate change?

The MIT-UTM Malaysia Sustainable Cities Program is pleased to share the 2017-2018 Research Agenda. The Research Agenda draws from the collective experiences of the thirteen MIT graduate students, UTM students, eight International Visiting Scholars, and MIT and UTM faculty members who participated in the MSCP 2017 Practicum. A new addition to this year's Research Agenda is potential Policy Memos highlighted in each section, directed to specific federal ministries.

Who is Associate Professor Janelle Knox Hayes? How can her work, focused on the Arctic, contribute to better climate adaptation as well as mitigation by a diverse set of stakeholders? What is a technocratic approach to dealing with climate change and how does it affect a particular cultures' ability to respond to challenges posed by the effects of climate change?

Learn the answers to these questions and more in the next DUSP Faculty Video featuring Associate Professor Janelle Knox-Hayes.

A prolonged 1960s-1970s debate about how to spur economic development in the US segregated areas of large cities in which racial ethnic minorities have historically been concentrated. This debate turned on two axes, the first concerned whether the labor force and capital assets located in the areas should be understood as integral to the structure of capital accumulation in the economy as a whole, or instead as structurally separate from mainstream capitalist processes and exploited primarily for their labor reserves.

The series will bring together leading thinkers to address the crucially important relationship between finance, geography, and sustainability. In the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis there can be little question of the importance of finance in the modern political economy. At the same time, the increasing significance of geographically grounded patterns of wealth and development inequality highlights the need for scholars and policymakers to address the relationship between finance and geography.

Bioenergy has entered the renewable energy strategy for addressing climate change. It contributes the largest fraction of renewable energy world wide, and is 60% of the renewable portfolio in the European Union. However, bioenergy is a high carbon emitting renewable with thermal carbon emission intensity comparable to coal. Yet the EU and most US states count bioenergy emissions as having zero emissions. The US Congress attempted to implement a carbon neutral amendment for forest bioenergy that is used in electric power generation.

Join us for the final MSCP Scholar Speaker Series. Room 9-450A, 12:30pm -2:00pm, lunch will be served. Topics of presentation and discussion will include:

As the omnipresence of and resultant increased dependency on smart devices accelerates, so does the security risks associated with the internet of things (IoT). NeuroMesh, a managed security solution providing cybersecurity for internet-connected devices, works to provide cybersecurity for IoT products, which are often produced with minimal consideration for the vulnerabilities they create in a network.

In January, led by Professor and MSCP Co-Director Larry Susskind, thirteen Masters of City Planning students from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology arrived in Malaysia to join the 2016-2017 MSCP International Visiting Scholars, UTM students, and UTM faculty in the annual MIT-UTM Sustainable Cities Program (MSCP) Practicum. During the Practicum, students and faculty identify emerging sustainable city development questions for future MSCP research, as well as learn from and highlight the successes of Malaysia’s efforts to become a developed nation by 2020.,.

We are now a decade into a new coalescence of capital, information, and socionature. As the speculative leverage built on U.S. predatory real estate capital collapsed into what Ben Bernanke called the worst global financial crisis in the history of capitalism, Silicon Valley visionaries were rediscovering and engineering an obscure but powerful concept developed in the 1920s by the Russian geochemist Vladimir Vernadsky: the noösphere.

Professor Pratima Bansal, Professor of General Management & Sustainability, Ivey Business School, Western University Canada will lead a discussion as part of the Finance, Geography, and Sustainability Speaker Series. She will discuss the relationship between conceptions of time and business sustainability.

Amy Plovnick, (MCP ’16) explores the way U.S. coastal cities are measuring their adaptation planning progress. While some cities have formulated plans to address climate change, implementation of these plans has been slow to follow. Cities need workable indicators they can use to track the implementation and effectiveness of their adaptation planning efforts. This turns out to be difficult. Continue reading about this topic in this week’s EPP blog post.

Negotiation analysis of climate change-related issues traditionally focuses on ways of resolving specific environmental crises or multiparty diplomacy as it relates to international climate agreements. In their recently published article, Mark Williams, Alex Green, and EPP DUSP PhD candidate, Ella Kim, examine how municipal leaders are increasingly negotiating to implement new policies for managing and adapting to the increasing impacts of climate change.

Natural resource agencies in the United States have traditionally favored adaptive management, a process emphasizing experimental learning to reduce uncertainty, to restore damaged ecosystems. However, empirically, these restoration efforts tend to rarely, truly reduce uncertainty and shift responsibility for implementation failures to agency organizational issues.