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...
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...
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 rampant1 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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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 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...
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 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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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 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 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 Public Interest Technologist MIT is part of the 66 university Public Interest Technology University Network (PIT-UN). Professor Larry Susskind is MIT's official representative to the Network. We are...
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-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...
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...
