Ezra Glenn

In addition to serving as Special Assistant in the Departmental Headquarters, Ezra is a Lecturer in the Department's Housing, Community, and Economic Development Group, where he teaches urban history, community development practice, thesis writing, quantitative methods for planning, and a special subject on "The City in Film." He is currently Co-chair of the Department's MCP Committee. He organizes the annual Undergraduate Planning Seminar, curates the MIT Urban Planning Film Series, and since 2009 has also filled the role of 12th Emissary of the Tech Sychogeographic Psociety (TSP).

Prior to coming to MIT, Ezra was Director of Community Development for the City of Lawrence, MA. Past positions include Director of Planning & Development for the City of Somerville, MA, and Land Use and Environmental Planner at the consulting firm of McGregor & Associates. He has been a member of the American Institute of Certified Planners since 2002.

He has taught urban planning, politics, and GIS mapping at Tufts University and the University of Massachusetts at Lowell, and is an active member of the Citizen Planning Training Collaborative, where he led seminars on both community planning and zoning practice. He is a board member and occasional instructor with the Mel King Institute for Community Building in Boston, and is also the founder and executive director of Public Planning, Research, and Implementation, Inc., a non-profit planning group established in 2002 to assist community-based organizations with land use and development planning projects.

He is a regular film reviewer for the American Planning Association's Planning magazine and a member of the Boston Society of Film Critics (BSFC). His reviews and essays have appeared in the Atlantic's CityLab, Experience Magazine, Bright Lights Film Journal, the Journal of the American Planning Association (JAPA), Shelterforce, Arts Fuse, the New York Observer, and NextCity. His poetry has been featured on Typishly and Prometheus Dreaming.

He is the developer and maintainer of the acs package for the R statistical computing language, an open-source tool for downloading and working with demographic data from the U.S. Census American Community Survey, and author of Working with the American Community Survey in R: A Guide to Using the acs Package (Springer, 2016).

In his own home town he served on the Board of Directors of the Somerville Community Corporation for over two decades, including two terms as both preseident and vice-president of the board. He's also very happy to be the subject of a song by The Michael J. Epstein Memorial Library.