To appreciate the explosive urbanization taking place in Asia, consider this analogy: Every 40 days, a city the equivalent size of Boston is built in Asia. Of the $24.7 trillion real estate investment opportunities predicted by 2030 in emerging cities, $17.8 trillion (72 percent) will be in Asia. While this growth is exciting to the real estate industry, it brings with it the attendant social and environmental issues.
The MIT campus is built to connect people. Some structures, like the Stata Center, the Sloan building, or the Media Lab building, offer large lobbies, flexible labs, and common spaces to enhance collaboration. MIT’s Infinite Corridor — which is one-sixth of a mile long — mixes thousands of people together daily. Aerial walkways connect campus research buildings.
Since the Industrial Revolution, cities and industry have grown together; towns and metropolitan regions have evolved around factories and expanding industries.
In February 2018, standing in front of local press and his high school’s leaders, student council president Tanner Bonner argued his case for a school walkout in response to the recent Parkland shooting. On behalf of his fellow students, Bonner wanted to organize a day dedicated to speaking about gun violence and mental health. The school was initially resistant, but after multiple meetings with school administrators, he managed to organize and facilitate the event. The experience made him realize the importance of speaking up to create change.
In the mid-1990s, a few energy activists in Massachusetts had a vision: What if citizens had choice about the energy they consumed? Instead of being force-fed electricity sources selected by a utility company, what if cities, towns, and groups of individuals could purchase power that was cleaner and cheaper?
Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala MCP ’78, PhD ’81, director-general of the World Trade Organization (WTO) and former finance minister of Nigeria, will deliver the address at the OneMIT Commencement Ceremony on Friday, May 27.
An expert in global finance, economics, and international development, Okonjo-Iweala is the first woman and first African to lead the WTO. Known as a skilled negotiator and consensus builder, she has devoted her career to helping developing countries achieve robust economic growth and sustainable development.
The Special Program for Urban and Regional Studies (SPURS) is a one-year, non-degree program designed for mid-career professionals from developing and newly industrializing countries. SPURS was founded in 1967 as part of MIT’s Department of Urban Studies and Planning (DUSP), which has a long-standing commitment to bringing outstanding individuals to MIT to reflect on their professional practice in the fields of planning and international development.
After 25 years as a planner in local government in New England, Jeff Levine, AICP, is training the next generation of planners as a faculty member in the Department of Urban Studies and Planning at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. His new book, Leadership in Planning (Routledge, 2021) explores a variety of case studies and real-world examples to get at what makes a good leader.
During the Covid-19 pandemic, many office workers have developed flexible working arrangements, to avoid too much time spent in crowded offices. But an MIT-supported survey project reveals a twist on this now-familiar scenario: Many workers with location flexibility are not necessarily working from home. Instead, they are taking their work to a “third place,” including cafés, libraries, and co-working spaces. About one-third of nonoffice work hours are spent in such places, the data show, even if those locations put people in closer proximity to others than working at home might.
In these pandemic-affected times, concern about Covid-19 can make it hard to know when to take part in “normal,” prepandemic activities. That may be especially true this winter, with the Omicron virus variant spreading and its severity still being studied.
Geography 2050 is a multi-year, strategic dialog hosted by the American Geographical Society. The 2021 event, whose Symposium Committee included DUSP’s Amy Glasmeier, engaged in strategic discussions about trends reshaping the field of geography, centering those discussions on addressing global economic, opportunity, mobility and educational inequality.
Two MIT doctoral students in the MIT School of Architecture and Planning have received the prestigious Fulbright-Hays Scholarship for Doctoral Dissertation Research Award. Courtney Lesoon and Elizabeth "Lizzie" Yarina are the first awardees from MIT in more than a decade.
On Wednesday, December 8th 2021, undergraduate students from across the School of Architecture and Planning gathered to share their thesis proposals with the MIT community. For an hour, students shared posters and discussed their research with their peers, graduate students, staff, and faculty. The event was organized by the Department of Urban Studies and Planning's Cherie Abbanat and Tara Mohtadi.
Learn more about individual students and their research below. You may click on individual student names to view their posters (when available).
If storytelling was once confined to a single medium — a tale told, for instance, in the pages of a book — the past few decades have seen narratives spill into different platforms and media, spreading across everything from comic books to films to fan-created websites. Scholars such as Henry Jenkins called this “transmedia,” referring to the way a single fictional universe might expand into multiple formats in the digital age.