"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...
*Emergency Medical Services and Health Equity The vision for this project is to draw from the experiences of those on the frontline of health care in low-income communities, first, to better understand social and...
A pedestrian volume model for Maine towns In collaboration with MaineDOT, the MIT City Form Lab is developing the first statewide pedestrian volume model for Maine. While Maine has long maintained vehicular traffic...
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...
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...
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...
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...
Designing 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...
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...
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...
Empowering Indigenous communities: A framework for climate resilience and migration planning in La Guajira, Colombia This project seeks to tackle the pressing issue of water and food shortages in Maicao, a region in Northern Colombia severely affected by drought due to climate change. This...
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...
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...
Hacking 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...
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...
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...
Housing Stability and the Social and Legal Dimensions of Evictions This research investigates the dynamics of eviction in order to more effectively design policy solutions and more appropriately target legal representation. The project seeks...
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...
Leadership in Planning Planning is an inherently political field, but many planners view working in such an environment as counter to their professional values. The truth is that planners must learn...
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...
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...
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...
More Equitable Local Tax Structures Economic recovery in distressed U.S. cities requires faster capital formation and financial relief for poor households. But the local property tax constrains cities’ ability...
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...
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...
Projections 18: Planning the 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 Building on early definitions of the term as describing interwoven crises, scholars more recently have sought to specify polycrisis in terms of harm, its global scope, and...
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...
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...
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...
Sidewalk Ballet Why do some streets attract more social activities than others? Is it the design of the street, or is it the land use pattern within neighborhoods that allows businesses...
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...
The BostonWalks This paper introduces the BostonWalks (BWS) study, detailing its methodology, the resulting dataset, and an initial analysis. The BWS study is a smartphone-based GNSS-tracking...
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 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 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 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...
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...
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...
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...
