On Sept. 21, a magnitude 7.1 earthquake struck Mexico City and the surrounding region, demolishing buildings, killing hundreds, and trapping and injuring many more. The disaster galvanized Mexican students in the MIT Department of Urban Studies and Planning (DUSP) to construct a crowdsourcing platform designed to link those in need of help with volunteers best positioned to assist with specific needs.
At a day-long event focused on global food and water security, DUSP's Professor Erica James presented on how she and Professor Dennis McLaughlin (Civil and Environmental Engineering) utilized their Seed Grant from the Abdul Latif Jameel World Water and Food Security Lab (J-WAFS) to identify opportunities to increase food production and security in the developing world.
DUSP is pleased to welcome four new faculty members into our community of intellectuals and practitioners. Each of these individuals brings their unique perspectives and skills in fields ranging from conflict studies, the historical evolution of markets and institutions, health and urbanism, and housing market analysis, to compliment and strengthen DUSP’s ability to study, engage, and address the current issues of our global community.
The four new professors are:
Jason Jackson, assistant professor
A new project between MIT and Tsinghua University will open new paths for the implementation of innovative concepts and technologies, pioneered at MIT, in the urban landscape of China. To read more about the new project, the Future City Innovation Connector (FCIC), read the full MIT News story, here.
In a joint MIT Department of Architecture and DUSP panel discussion session, Legacies of Discrimination and the Built Environment, DUSP faculty members, Dayna Cunningham and Justin Steil as well as 2017-2018 Martin Luther King Jr.
In 'The Suburb of the Future, Almost Here,' Alan Berger, Professor of Landscape Architecture and Urban Design, discusses how innovations in technology, planning, and design are amplifying the environmental affects of climate change and the preferences of millennial suburbanites to transform the landscape of suburbia. To read his analysis of disruptive technologies, such as drones and autonomous vehicles, possible future impacts on the suburbs, click here.
As the world continues to set higher targets for clean energy production, how do urban regions, who were previously world leaders in extractive based energy production, such as coal, reclaim their landscapes while simultaneously transitioning to new energy and economic paradigms?
In the wake of the hurricanes in the Gulf and Florida, as well as the massive wildfires raging through the West Coast, Americans will be dealing with the aftermath, both economically and socially, of these natural disasters for decades to come. In a new article on Five Thirty Eight, Maggie Koerth-Baker, highlights the work of DUSP’s Mariana Arcaya, to emphasize that the health impacts of major natural disasters persist beyond the immediate event, sometimes for decades to come.
By Chaewon Ahn
The Ghost Cities project is introduced at the Seoul Biennale of Architecture and Urbanism as part of the “Commoning Cities” exhibition. The exhibition opened in September 2nd at the Dongdaemun Design Plaza (DDP) in Seoul, and will continue until November 5th.
In a new article entitled ‘Sharing Economies: Moving beyond Binaries in a Digital Age’ in the Cambridge Journal of Regions, Economy and Society, Janelle Knox-Hayes, Anna Davies (Trinity College), Betsy Donald (Queen’s University), and Mia Gray (University of Cambridge) explore the benefits of building a lexicon for describing and understanding diverse sharing economies.
As we continue to invest and rely upon interconnected, smart devices (the Internet of Things), are we providing gateways to disable or attack entire smart cities of the future?
Flying through Texas last weekend on his way to a workshop in Mexico, Brent Ryan found himself stranded at a hotel near Houston’s Bush International Airport as a result of Hurricane Harvey’s catastrophic flooding. An associate professor of urban design and planning at MIT, Ryan and two of his graduate students watched the waters rise and considered the implications of the disaster unfolding around them.
DUSP's Brent Ryan, Fadi Masoud (University of Toronto), and the MIT Leventhal Center for Advanced Urbanism are seeking to explore this relationship via an innovative approach to traditional case study models.
In a new place-based study, DUSP's Siqi Zheng, Weizeng Sun (Jinan University), Jianfeng Wu (Fudan University), and Mathew Kahn (USC Economics Department), measure and analyze the spillover effects of 110 industrial parks built near eight major cities in China, focusing on the changes in productivity, wages, and localized employment in the urban areas.
To learn more about the study, read the MIT News article here:
Scrapes of food account for 22 percent of municipal solid waste deposited in landfills or incinerators in the U.S., diverting that waste into composting and soil enrichment programs could have a significant effect on our environment.
The Fulbright Program, sponsored by the U.S. Department of State, operates in over 160 countries. Recipients of Fulbright awards represent excellent achievements in their academic and professional lives as well as demonstrated ability and leadership potential in their roles as cultural ambassadors.
Ms. Gordon will conduct her research in the Inner Mongolia, Jiangxi, and Guizhou provinces. She will be studying how governmental policies affect climate change adaptation in China.
By Yasmin Zaerpoor
For the seventh year, MIT Professor Lawrence Susskind and Tufts Professor Shafiqul Islam hosted an international week-long Water Diplomacy Workshop for water professionals in Boston. This year’s event was hosted at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in Cambridge, Massachusetts. The Department of Urban Studies and Planning (DUSP) at MIT provided wonderful teaching space for this year’s workshop.
While the relationship between neighborhood effects on health are widely supported by current research, but what do we know about how does health selection into neighborhoods affect the observed link between place and health?
In an article in Preventive Medicine Reports, DUSP's Mariana Arcaya, as well as, Ruth Coleman (Oxford), Fahad Rzazk (Li Ka Shing Knowledge Institute of St Michael's Hospital), Maria Alva (RTI International), and Rury Holman (Oxford), explore what hidden factors may be informing the connection between where we live and the health outcomes.
Each year, 20 promising environmental leaders are selected by their academic institution or environmental experts to be named as the year's Switzer Fellows. In 2017, this select group included two DUSP students: Adam Hasz and Doug McPherson:
Why has displacement become a key academic theme, is the academic displacement literature useful for understanding the phenomena, and is displacement best conceptualized as global, local, or in a comparative context?
In a new virtual symposium, New Directions in Displacement Research, initiated by Professor Balakrishnan Rajagopal and co-edited by Sai Balakrishnan, Harvard Graduate School of Design, and Nicholas Blomley, Simon Fraser University, leading scholars engage with these questions and more to generate reflections on the field and deepen our understanding of displacement.
One of the leading causes of water pollution is runoff from continued urbanization and aging urban infrastructure. Two new technologies, green and smart infrastructure systems, are often proposed to improve stormwater management. DUSP’s Dr. Ting Meng and Professor David Hsu, with Professor Bridget Wadzuk from Villanova University, examine the perspectives of local agency officials in Pennsylvania to better understand the perceived advantages and disadvantages of these proposed technologies, and to suggest how to overcome barriers to adoption.
Buildings are responsible for about 40% of primary energy consumption and one-third of greenhouse gas emissions worldwide. As part of energy efficiency efforts, governments increasingly require building owners to measure and disclose their energy use, but do these policies themselves affect energy consumption? In a new article for Energy, DUSP’s Dr. Ting Meng and Professor David Hsu and the University of Calgary's Dr.
As an undergraduate at Princeton University, Jessica Myers MCP ’17 threw herself into writing a thesis on urban food markets in New Orleans. After many months of work, however, she was disappointed to see it filed away, virtually unread. For her graduate thesis in MIT’s Department of Urban Studies and Planning (DUSP), she was determined to resist that fate.
On June 26, the U.S. Supreme Court agreed to hear arguments relating to President Donald Trump's recent executive order on travel, which limits individuals from six majority-Musliim countries and refugees worldwide from entering the United States. The court also ruled to uphold a limited version of the travel ban, which went into effect on June 29. President Trump cited this as “a clear victory for our national security.”
Arcaya will examine how the emergence of revolutionary health care technology, the evolution of socioeconomic status through the influence of new technologies and ideologies, the shifting inequity in access to health insurance, disparate levels of environmental exposures, and the public health effects of climate change, threaten to accelerate and intensify inequalities in public health in the United States.
Follow the conversation online via Twitter here using the hashtag #healthequity