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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
Massachusetts Covenants Project This research project is systematically identifying and analyzing one of the widespread mechanisms through which housing discrimination has shaped residential patterns and...
MIT-India Urban Lab The MIT India Urban Lab (MIUL) focuses on fostering equitable urban environments by addressing systemic inequalities and promoting inclusive practices in housing and community...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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 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 Klondike Memory Project The Klondike Memory Project is a community-driven effort to uncover the memories of Klondike, one of the first neighborhoods designed for African American homeownership in the...
The Legacy of 87 Adams The Legacy of 87 Adams seeks to illuminate the long-hidden stories of enslaved people who were bought and sold in the shadows of historic churches in Memphis, Tennessee. Our...
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-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...
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...
Waka Lagos: An Evaluation of Pedestrian Access to Metro Stations in Lagos, Nigeria The project asks what defines a walkable environment in Global South cities, and how can a combined approach of AI-driven analysis and local insights better capture pedestrian...
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...
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...
