"Wise Cities" Chronicle Blending historical research, ethnographic inquiry, case studies, and interviews, the Wise City Chronicle documents, categorizes, analyzes, shares, and promotes work by urban...
Actualizing Institutional Change in Academic Environments: Attitudes, Rewards, & Obstacles The project centers the attitudes, rewards, and obstacles that are associated with the Black DUSP Thesis within the department and what institutional barriers have hindered...
Advancing Infrastructure Equity in Brazil In São Paulo, occupied high-rise buildings in the city center represent one of the starkest pictures of how infrastructural equity evades vulnerable residents even within...
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...
Anti-Gentrification Planning in Post-Industrial Woodstock, Cape Town, S.A. South African cities bear the scars of racial segregation. Central business districts (CBDs) and inner-city neighborhoods were contested spaces that witnessed mass evictions...
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...
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...
Birthing Justice and the Built Environment in Greater Boston Through a combination of qualitative research and spatial mapping, this project aims to ask: how do birth equity advocates view the connections between the built environment...
Black Collective Memory as Economic Development Practice: Resistance and Renaissance in Louisiana's River Parishes Louisiana's River Parishes are located between New Orleans and Baton Rouge along the Mississippi River and is also known as Cancer Alley, due to the high density of...
Black Ritualistic Soundscapes: Rhythm and the Restoration of Reciprocal Relationships to Land as a Means of Eco-Ancestral Repair This project engages in embodied land-based research to understand how re-establishing Black reciprocal relationships to land in the Americas holds the potential to facilitate...
Building Collective Power & Climate Justice Through Community Ownership of Distributed Energy Resources The energy transition, away from a nearly-fully fossil fuel-based system and towards a renewable future, is happening. This research project aims to build a deeper, applied...
Catalyzing Equitable Climate Investments: Green Banks in Chicago and Philadelphia The push for the clean energy transition occurs in the context of American cities that continue to face disinvestment in black and brown communities. An important leverage...
Cities of a Warming North This project seeks to understand the challenges and opportunities facing small- to mid-sized cities in traditionally colder climates as they adapt to new migration & economic...
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...
Climate Crisis and Real Estate: Science-based Mitigation and Adaptation Strategies This project employs a data-driven empirical approach to unpack the behavioral and economic mechanisms in the climate change and real estate dynamics, to provide scientific...
Climate Planning Forum An initiative by DUSP Students & Fellows: to ensure our planet remains habitable, multiple disciplines must come together with a coherent approach for managing change. The...
Co-Creating a Digital Participatory Mapping Toolkit for Social Change This project is to co-develop and pilot a participatory mapping toolkit alongside multiple Boston-area community based organizations and resident researchers interested in...
Co-creating a Theory of Change for Anti-Racist Research Through an ongoing partnership with PowerCorps Boston (PCB), we developed the basis for a theory of change for anti-racist research, with the guidance of the RJRI. This...
Co-Designing Digital Tools to Support Justice for Indigenous Women, Girls, and Two-Spirit People This project unfolds against the backdrop of systemic drivers of Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and People (MMIW/P), as well as the solutions-oriented frameworks posed...
Community Ownership of Renewable Energy Projects Considering the needs of all stakeholders, including community leaders, government officials, industry leaders, Tribal leaders, and researchers, this project aims to...
Community Transportation Acts Archive How might residents with mobility challenges in Maine advance their communities’ transportation goals through the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act (IIJA)? This project...
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 Justice and Planning Ableism, the discrimination and social prejudice faced by people with disabilities, is rampant 1 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...
Economic Nationalism Economic nationalism has returned to the fore of scholarly and policy debates. The concept took on renewed significance in the wake of the global financial crisis as countries...
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...
Feminist Smart Cities Since 2019, mass surveillance efforts for urban women’s safety have become popular in India, with its government backing the world’s largest system of facial recognition CCTVs...
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...
Global Corporations and International Law A multi-year collaborative research project on Global Corporations and International Law. This project is designed to rethink how we understand the company-state-international...
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...
Groundwork for Reparations: the funding of MIT at the expense of Indigenous Peoples The mission of this project is to start the long process of gathering all the information about the benefit of MIT at the expense of the Indigenous land that was stolen and...
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...
Identifying and Analyzing Restrictive Covenants This research project is systematically identifying and analyzing one of the widespread mechanisms through which housing discrimination has shaped residential patterns and...
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...
Industry Agglomeration and Innovation-Driven Economic Growth: A Framework for Data, Metrics, and Evaluation Glasmeier and Lynch are pioneering the analysis of the geographies of investment in current federal programs and policies, including the National Science Foundation’s Regional...
Justice Centered Healthy Mobilities The Justice Centered Healthy Mobilities (JCHM) research group plans to collaborate with youth from the Boston neighborhood of Mattapan on issues related to transportation. By...
Klondike Memory Project: Reaffirming, Reclaiming, and Repairing Identity in Klondike Memphis The Klondike Memory Project is a participatory action research project that collaborates with the leaders of the Klondike community to ensure that long-erased neighborhood...
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...
Mens, Manus and Machina (M3S) The Singapore MIT-Alliance for Research and Technology ( SMART), MIT’s research enterprise in Singapore, has launched a new interdisciplinary research group aimed at tackling...
Misfit Bodies, Misfit Environments This project is developing an easy-to-print and distribute zine with photos, quotes, anecdotes and texts, in collaboration with artist and MCP’23 classmate Melissa Teng. It...
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...
Modeling Abolition Modeling Abolition is a monograph that takes seriously the structuring forces of white supremacy and transphobia on the daily practices of making software. Through historical...
Modeling Abolition: Building a New World from the Data of the Old Modeling Abolition is a monograph that takes seriously the structuring forces of white supremacy and transphobia on the daily practices of making software. Through historical...
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...
My Sister's Keeper My Sister’s Keeper aims to establish a professional leadership incubator designed specifically for Muslim immigrant women in the United States. The project, aimed at...
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...
Offshore Wind Stakeholder Assessment Decarbonizing the United States’ energy supplies to meet climate targets will require a rapid transition to renewable energy. Some estimates suggest that renewable energy...
Operationalizing a Civilian Climate Corps DUSP and Architecture 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...
Pa’ashi Park: Reclaiming the Lake of California’s Tulare Lake Basin, Guided by Two-Eyed Seeing This project investigates nature-based climate adaptation as a form of reparative planning that responds to the environmental and social damage caused by land reclamation...
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...
Perspectives on Power: Reflective dialogue with communities affected by large-scale renewable energy projects Growing opposition to renewable energy projects is blocking the speed and scale of the necessary energy transition, but local governments are responding by superseding...
Planning for Aging Societies in the US and Japan: a study of senescence, demographic decline, and climate resilience This project, a collaboration between Professor Brent D. Ryan of MIT and Professor Takefumi Kurose of Kyushu University and Professor Ken-Ichi Yabuki of Yokohama University...
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...
Political Economy of the Climate Crisis: Institutions, Power and Global Governance This project takes a political economy approach to climate change, enabling an explicit focus on institutions, power and global governance. It centers on three interrelated...
Projections 18: Planning for Polycrisis We live in a time of “polycrisis”: multiple protracted, compounded, and interconnected crises that produce conditions of profound uncertainty, volatility, and fragility in...
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...
Race and Computation Recent advances in computation and big data techniques have enabled major breakthroughs that have changed the way many of us live, learn, and interact with others. While the...
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...
RealTalk for East Africans in Florida The RealTalk for East Africans in Florida project aimed to understand the concerns and challenges faced by East African immigrants and children of immigrants living in South...
Redevelopment of West Bengal’s Jute Mills in Post-Industrial Kolkata, India The Kolkata Jute Mills project, occurring in collaboration with Professor Souvanic Roy of Indian Institute of Engineering, Science, and Technology, Howrah, India, and...
Renewable Energy Siting Clinic Meeting U.S. decarbonization goals necessitates a rapid transition to renewable energy. Understanding sources of local resistance and transforming the facility siting process...
Repurposing Colonialism: The politics of World Heritage production in postcolonial nation-states Through a transnational comparative study of colonial-era World Heritage sites in South and Southeast Asia, my dissertation examines diverging approaches to postcolonial...
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...
Re“casting” climate anthropocene in the context of Modern India The research conducted as part of the RJRI project focused on mapping caste-based inequalities and socio-spatial segregation patterns in the context of climate-related...
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...
Shrinking Cities in Northeast China and the Rust Belt US: A transnational comparison This project, a collaboration between Professor Brent D. Ryan of MIT, Professor Shuqi Gao of Southeast University, Nanjing, China, and Professor Ying Long of Tsinghua...
Signals of Inclusion How is it, exactly, that multiple communities may coexist in the same physical spaces? This contribution to DUSP's racially just research initiative emphasizes the role of...
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 Consumed City Once the heart of a powerful maritime republic, Venice’s historic city has lost more than 120,000 residents since the early 1950s, driven away by myriad issues, including...
The DUSP Center for Renewable Energy and Climate Justice The Center for Renewable Energy and Climate Justice is housed in the MIT Department of Urban Studies and Planning (DUSP). It is dedicated to advancing renewable energy...
The Equitably Resilient City This book, released on October 1, 2024--and available for purchase or Open Access free download from MIT Press, presents a framework for simultaneously making cities more...
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 Idea of ‘Cultural Preservation Districts’: Oral Histories of the Creation of the Latino Cultural District Community organizers in San Francisco's Mission District first pioneered the idea of ‘cultural preservation districts’ in the early 2010s as an iterative, experimental...
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 Public Interest Technologist The Public Interest Technologist is an online publication aimed at helping the MIT community think together about the social responsibilities of students, administration...
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...
The Southeast Los Angeles (SELA) Community Map The SELA Community Map documents the stories of people and spaces in Southeast Los Angeles through writing, oral histories, and illustration. Originally an online community...
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...
Transit-Centric Smart Mobility System for High-Growth Urban Activity Centers: Improving Energy Efficiency through Machine Learning A US Department of Energy sponsored project with teams from Northeastern University, the National Renewable Energy Laboratory, the Chicago Transit Authority, and MIT. The MIT...
Ukraine Community Recovery Academy The Association of Ukrainian Cities, in partnership with DUSP, is organizing an online training course for Ukrainian mayors and officials, mostly in small and medium sized...
Urban Climate Finance for Rapidly Growing Amazonian Cities Despite a diverse and complex host of public and private financing sources supporting climate mitigation and adaptation actions, scholarship knows little about how well cities...
Wandsworth Road: Reimagining the British High Street The products of my research included documentation of the neighborhood via narrative writing, photography, and interactive mapping. I really valued the chance to more deeply...
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...
What's on your calendar? Investigating The Relationships Between Spatio-temporal Visualizations and Indigenous Ways of Knowing What is the relationship between spatio-temporal visualization and Indigenous ways of knowing? To answer this question, this project studies the visualization of Indigenous...
Who Owns Massachusetts Widespread institutional ownership of residential properties is a relatively recent phenomenon, and one that poses both serious empirical problems for researchers and serious...
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...
Youngstown: Land use and neighborhood planning implementation in a US postindustrial shrinking city Youngstown, Ohio is a postindustrial city in Ohio, USA that has been challenged by economic decline and a seemingly insurmountable number of vacant and neighborhood properties...
