Agglomeration and Immigration: What Makes Natives Move? This project examines the dynamics behind the mobility patterns in Denmark. Does the increasing number of immigrants impact the urbanization forces in Demark and the mobility...
Aging and the Built Environment MIT's AgeLab continues to work with DUSP students and offers the recently developed graduate course Global Aging & The City addressing city design/planning, transportation...
Audit the Streets Auditing the heritage landscape of cities to highlight the disparities and gaps in commemoration practices The "heritage landscape" of a city is the collection of street names...
Autonomous Mobility The advent of autonomous-vehicle (AV) technology promises to upend urban mobility and transportation policy. Yet this technology, as well as its possible social and...
Beyond Fairness: Reparative Algorithms to Address Historical Injustices of Housing Discrimination in the US Fairness in Machine Learning (ML) has mostly focused on interrogating the fairness of a particular decision point with assumptions made that the people represented in the data...
Center for Constructive Communication Our mission is to design human-machine systems that improve communication across divides and increase opportunity for underheard communities. Political, media and...
City Design and Development / Urbanism / LCAU Fall 2022 Lecture Series Image credit: Nick Allen What Does Urban Science Have to Say About Urban Design? As scientific and data-driven methods for spatial analysis have become increasingly rooted in...
City Scanner City Scanner proposes a drive-by solution to capture the spatiotemporal variation in environmental indicators in urban areas, such as air quality or the thermal flux of the...
Climate and Real Estate Hub The real estate sector is responsible for 40% of all carbon emissions globally. At the same time, with the built environment at risk to fire, flooding, hurricane, extreme heat...
Climate Change and Global Sentiment What is the impact of climate events, such as temperature increases and environmental disasters, on subjective wellbeing and happiness? This project aims at addressing this...
Covid Flows This project explores data from Safegraph that catalogues changes in visitorship and flows during the COVID-19 lockdown. This preliminary data visualization lays out the...
Cybersecurity for Critical Urban Infrastructure When considering cyber defenses, security professionals and critical infrastructure operators immediately think about technical solutions such as intrusion detection systems...
Data Against Feminicide Data Against Feminicide is a feminist participatory action research project led by Catherine D’Ignazio (Data + Feminism Lab @ MIT), Silvana Fumega (ILDA) and Helena Suárez Val...
Digital Matatus Digital Matatus shows how to leverage the ubiquitous nature of cellphone technology in developing countries to collect data for essential infrastructure, give it out freely...
Disability and Planning Ableism, the discrimination and social prejudice faced by people with disabilities, is rampant1 across urban planning, architecture, real estate, and other design fields and...
Dust Tracker Can we use cars to follow dust events? In this project, the team works with a local mining community in Sparwood, British Columbia to deploy a drive-by sensing platform to map...
Effects of Climate Change Related Disasters on Low-Income Renters This research focuses on the impacts of climate change related disasters, particularly on low-income renters. This research seeks to understand how these acute events effect...
Electricity Market Institutions and Governance This book project focuses on new and emerging alternatives for users of the electric grid to participate in and govern this system. For much of its history, the electric grid...
Emergency Medical Services and Health Equity The vision for this project is to identify, from the experiences of those on the frontline of health care in low-income communities, how to improve health equity, first by...
Enhancing Urban Water Affordability Urban households across the United States—and the water departments that serve them—are under tremendous financial pressure to maintain access to safe drinking water...
Favelas 4D Nearly one billion people live in informal settlements worldwide. In Brazil, these settlements are known as favelas, and they are characterized by a dense and complex urban...
Feminist Hackathons Numerous taboo topics relate to women's bodies: sexual assault, breastfeeding, postpartum support, infant mortality, menstruation, miscarriage, abortion and more. Stigma and...
Following or breaking the path? A morphological comparison of Soviet and Post-Soviet residential areas in Kyiv Soviet residential areas were constructed as ‘whole community’ ensembles of residences, retail areas, community facilities, and green space in association with transport...
Furthering Fair Housing The Furthering Fair Housing project is gathering and analyzing the Assessments of Fair Housing created by municipalities across the country created in response to the 2015...
Good Vibrations Mobile phones with embedded sensors provide data streams that could transform the way the public interacts with infrastructure as well as the local government’s role in...
GTFS toolbox for ArcGIS Pro The City Form Lab has released a free and open-source GIS toolbox for ArcGIS Pro for computing spatial accessibility via public transport using GTFS data. The toolbox computes...
Hack the Archive A vanguard generation of progressive activists is approaching advanced age just as many of their 1960s era defining battles are taking on renewed political urgency. These...
Haiti Projects Haiti Projects is a 501(C)(3) corporation with focused initiatives to empower women of rural Haiti toward self-sufficiency. We provide access to jobs at fair trade wages...
Health Impact Assessment Program Development The social and built environments in which we live have profound impacts on our health. Health Impact Assessment is a tool to help gauge the potential ramifications proposed...
Healthy Communities Through Housing Justice Housing conditions are broadly understood to affect health, with research linking cost, crowding, unit quality, homelessness, eviction, foreclosure and other individual-level...
Healthy Neighborhoods Study The Healthy Neighborhoods Study (HNS), based in Boston, is the largest resident-driven, participatory action research project in the US about neighborhood change processes...
Hidden Successes: Good Performance in the Public Sector Published literature in planning shows a strong bias against public entities. This dates back to the early 1980s when the attack on public sector was started by neoclassical...
Indigenous Community Planning The Indigenous Community Planning project in DUSP is a multi-disciplinary research and teaching effort that seeks to center Indigeneity within the field of urban planning...
Industrial Urbanism: Places of Production INDUSTRIAL URBANISM suggests that economics-driven frameworks of industry be extended into an analysis that includes the physical environment and city-building. Such a...
Kolkata Jute Mills This project studies the remediation of industrial decline and potential for post-industrial redevelopment, using the case of West Bengal’s jute industry in India. The jute...
Land Use of Transportation In this project (joint with Lyndsey Rolheiser of Ryerson University), we develop a theoretical understanding of transportation modes centered around the land used by the...
Landlord Tech Watch Landlord Tech—what the real estate industry describes as residential property technology, is leading to new forms of housing injustice. Property technology, or “proptech,” has...
Leveraging Transit Data for Behavioral Insights The JTL-Transit Lab has worked with leading transit agencies around the world to derive unique insights into passenger behavior from transit smartcards and other automatic...
Living Data Hubs "Living Data Hubs: People and Data in Kibera" is a collaborative project seeking to address the critical data gap found in informal communities through community data...
Living Heritage Atlas | Beirut Living Heritage Atlas | Beirut is a design-based research project that contributes to the urban planning discussion on Beirut's heritage by rendering visible the often...
Living Wage Calculator Families and individuals working in low-wage jobs make insufficient income to meet minimum standards given the local cost of living. We developed a living wage calculator to...
Main Street After COVID-19 There has been a fair amount of research on what can help downtowns weather this pandemic in the short term. Financial assistance and thoughtful balancing of public health and...
Malden River Works The objective of the Malden River Works project is to bring together a new coalition of community leaders of color, environmental advocates, and government stakeholders in...
MIT Global Health & Medical Humanities Initiative This Initiative examines illness and disease from multiple perspectives, not only as a matter of individual physiology. This means also thinking through the political...
MIT Work of the Future Task Force: Regions and Industries A host of institutions and organizations, as well as norms and policies, shape the relationship between technology, workers, and society more broadly. Institutions and...
Mobility in the 15-Minute City The project uses large scale urban mobility data sets derived by cell phone data to quantify to what extent US cities are conforming to the 15-min city vision, according to...
More Equitable Local Tax Structures Image credit: Alex S. MacLean for MIT Community Only Economic recovery in distressed U.S. cities requires faster capital formation and financial relief for poor households...
Next Optimized Generation of Autonomous Suburbs (NOGAS) Autonomous driving (AD) and other automation technologies are rapidly approaching the market and could alter practically every structural aspect of household life established...
Operationalizing a Civilian Climate Corps DUSP and Arch have been working on a vision for a Civilian Climate Corps (CCC) and how it can specifically be linked to design, planning and policy. The objectives are to help...
Overcoming Opposition to Renewable Energy Facilities in America In 2019, 77% of the U.S. population supported renewables over fossil fuels. So, why doesn’t renewable energy account for a majority of our electricity generation? To explore...
Pedestrian Impact Assessment This project builds a high-resolution model of pedestrian activity within a city, offering a novel framework to evaluate how planned urban development projects or public space...
Planning for Peace Launched in the summer of 2020 as part of the SA+P student research funding initiative: Planning for Peace employed five students in the Departments of Architecture and...
Planning Ideas that Matter Podcast The first season of DUSP's Planning Ideas that Matter Podcast, hosted by Dave Lishansky and Takeo Kuwabara, builds upon the Fall 2017 faculty debates on the field and concept...
Projections 17: Planning Just Indigenous Futures, Challenging 21st-Century Empire Urban planning has long distinguished itself from other applied fields (such as public policy and social work) through claiming a privileged relationship to the future...
Public Transportation Management and Policy A robust public transit network is an integral part of an urban transportation system. The joint JTL-Transit Lab merges behavioral science and systems engineering to determine...
Re-Measuring Gentrification Gentrification is typically measured by long-term changes in neighborhood composition, I argue that we should examine the relationship between relative house prices and...
Real Talk for Change We believe that a better, more equitable Boston will be built when the city understands and listens to its historically underheard people. Surveys and opinion polls of “likely...
Restoring Metro Boston Transit Ridership This project seeks to understand transit ridership declines as a result of COVID-19 and identify interventions that will be most effective in restoring ridership in Metro...
Roboat Roboat imagines a future where autonomous waterborne platforms can serve as on-demand urban infrastructure. Working at the intersection of robotics, urban design, and...
Rwanda’s Genocide Heritage: Between Memory and Sovereignty Rwanda’s Genocide Heritage is a spatial history of genocide memory in Rwanda. It reconstructs why Rwanda’s genocide memorials display the remains of the dead and how such...
See You in the Future See You in the Future is a storytelling project that lifts up the communities of the "Mass. and Cass" intersection in Boston, MA. Like any community, this intersection is a...
Sensing Light In Sensing Light, we review existing cases of cities that are digitizing their public lighting infrastructure and analyze their various approaches to smart lighting to propose...
Spatial Equity NYC Spatial equity is a way to understand how public space is distributed and restricted, used and made unusable, and the different outcomes that result for different communities...
Special Program for Urban and Regional Studies The Special Program for Urban and Regional Studies (SPURS) is a one-year non-degree program for mid-career individuals who are or will be shaping policy in developing...
Strategic Coaching Units: Latin America and the Caribbean Leading in partnership with the MIT Science Impact Collaborative and the MIT-Harvard Public Disputes Program, our regional initiative focuses on creating impactful hubs...
Sustainable Urbanization Around three and a half billion people live in cities today and approximately five billion people are projected to live in cities by 2030. Though world's cities occupy just...
The Equitably Resilient City This book project presents a framework for simultaneously making cities more equitable and more resilient to environmental hazards. Our model of the equitably resilient city...
The Ethics of Stability: Building Peace in Rwanda The Ethics of Stability explores peacebuilding in post-genocide Rwanda as a socio-spatial endeavor; one that is defined and challenged in the design of homes, settlements, and...
The Global Rise of Platform Firms in Urban Mobility Markets This research addresses one of the most pressing issues in contemporary market society: the controversial rise of the platform economy. Digital platform are radically...
The Impact of Police Surveillance on Racial Bias using Open Data How do new policing technologies affect racial bias in police-citizen encounters? Proponents claim that such technologies are ‘colorblind’ and thus should reduce racial or...
The Potential for Private Irrigation in Senegal Throughout the developing world, the dissemination of irrigation equipment can help farmers mitigate a principle risk of agricultural production: variable rainfall. This risk...
The Social and Legal Dimensions of Evictions The goal of this project is to better understand the dynamics of eviction in order to more effectively design policy solutions and more appropriately target legal...
Transit Access: Improving Walking and Biking to Commuter Rail Stations in Greater Boston Pedestrian- and bicycle path-choice studies have shown that people's perception of distance can substantially differ from objectively measured distance. For instance, walking...
We Who Engage We Who Engage is a project facilitating conversations and action around greater civic engagement in our democracy. Dr McDowell has developed a Civic Design Framework that...
West Philadelphia Landscape Project Since 1987, the West Philadelphia Landscape Project (WPLP) has worked in the Mill Creek watershed and neighborhood. Our mission is to restore nature and rebuild community...
Workers' Paradise: The Forgotten Communities of World War I This project concerns revealing and documenting the rapidly vanishing, unique, and scarcely known housing projects and neighborhoods that were designed and constructed all...
