Projects

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...

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...

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 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...

Documenting and Evaluating the Resettlement Planning of Isle de Jean Charles

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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 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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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 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 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...

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...

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...