Subjects

The topic of this year’s Digital City Design Workshop is heat in cities. Global temperatures are increasing consistently, with harsh consequences to cities: warmer temperatures present public health threats, increase energy consumption spent with cooling systems, and move people away from public transportation and active modes, pushing emissions up, and leading to a vicious cycle. To have a real-world sense of the challenges warmer temperatures present in cities, and which opportunities the combination of sensing technologies, data analytics, and design bring to tackle this crisis, we will focus on two sites: Dubai, United Arab Emirates, and Rome, Italy.  Students will conduct and present background research, identify relevant questions, deploy active sensing devices or tap into open datasets already present in cities, collect data, prepare analysis, and develop design ideas integrating technologies. The workshop combines lectures, hands-on activities, fieldwork, and students' work supervised by the teaching team. Fieldwork will be performed as part of a site visit in Dubai and Rome during the week of March 24th (Spring Break). Students are expected to travel to either one of the two cities and travel expenses will be covered by the course. Students are required to apply at this link https://podio.com/webforms/30025911/2504254

Instructors: Fábio Duarte, Simone Mora

Covers the design, ethical, and technical skills for creating effective visualizations. Short assignments build familiarity with the data analysis and visualization design process. Weekly lab sessions present coding and technical skills. A final project provides experience working with real-world big data, provided by external partners, in order to expose and communicate insights about societal issues. Students taking graduate version complete additional assignments.

Every landscape represents an incomplete or interrupted plan that tells time and intention. Physical landscapes provide evidence of successful, failed and emergent development plans, but only the learned eye sees beyond the material culture of the street. “Death” offers a way to conceptualize the unseen, underground, the underneath, the liminal space between what we know, what is actual and what is yet to be. Linking social theory, geography, public policy and planning history, this course asks: How can planners and critical observers of the built environment begin to access the collection of meanings that script the movement, stasis and location of everyday users? In other words, how do we move beyond official maps, plans and histories to consider contested meanings of place as they are lived, exchanged and created. Through weekly examinations of first person documentary accounts including ethnography, historical fiction, autobiography, film and novels, students will analyze the social, political and geographic impact of various land development strategies in the U.S. and beyond. Displacement defines a major theme of this course -- students will examine: 1) How does this happen? 2) What have been subsequent local responses? And, 3) What are the lasting consequences of population dispersals? 

Informed by ethnographic method and archival immersion, this course will provide students with an interdisciplinary framework for identifying and describing the social impact of place-based change and capital movement. Students will develop a critical understanding of urban planning informed by resident-authored analysis across time and space.

Examines how cities are applying artificial intelligence to enhance service delivery, engage with constituents, and optimize administration. Introduces students to AI methods and tools being used in fields such as transportation, public safety, and urban planning. Explores AI's challenges in areas including privacy, security, fairness, and transparency, and the policy strategies that governments can use to mitigate these risks. Features guest lectures from government and industry experts leading real-world AI initiatives. No specific technical background is required. For the final project, students develop proposals for AI-driven solutions to specific challenges in their own cities.

This seminar investigates the need for new ways to think about landscape + infrastructure as the impacts of climate change alters the way we design and live in urbanized areas. We will focus on the planning, design, and implementation of real physical infrastructures (versus policies and other soft infrastructure levers). This class begins by acknowledging that humanity has entered into a new geologic epoch termed the Anthropocene, defined by anthropogenic impacts on the planet. Important questions about landscape + infrastructure for the Anthropocene will be explored: Where do planners/designers have agency to mitigate with newly imagined infrastructures for our changing cities and planetary health? At what scale is infrastructure an appropriate response to an environmental problem? How does one evaluate effectiveness and other trade-offs / costs / benefits of resiliency? Can one build consensus among key players / constituents around what is happening and how the designed response addresses needs? How do designers or planners gain political, financial, and social support to guarantee that build out and maintenance are implemented as envisioned?

"Making Good on Baltimore as a Just City: Building Solutions For A Vacant Housing Crisis, as a practicum will have students immersed in two related projects: Develop a complex revitalization plan for a neglected city neighborhood using the case scenario, The Urban Plan (UP) and complete deliverables for a real client, Flight Blight Baltimore. The UP case scenario activities examine the nexus between development and urban planning. Students will go through an eight-stage development process model, and the material will cover idea conception, feasibility, planning, financing, market analysis, contract negotiation, construction, and asset management. Other topics discussed include but are not limited to market analysis, site acquisition, due diligence, zoning, entitlements, approvals, site planning, building design, construction, financing, leasing, and ongoing management and disposition. 

Working on a project for a client will allow students to solve a community challenge in real-time, pushing students to rethink the concept of stakeholder engagement in vacant housing underutilized infrastructure in Baltimore. Students will engage the idea of using citizen engineers to explore how the current demolish vacant building initiative by the City of Baltimore can integrate resident perspective in the city’s neighborhood stabilization initiatives. Part of this course will also explore how emerging vacant building assessment digital technology certification in the job market is linked to just banking and economies. The primary deliverables will center on data collection and analysis, and mapping. During the practicum experience, students will create their personal theory of practice, develop reflective practice strategies, and learn and deploy community engagement strategies."

This workshop provides a practical introduction to Quantitative Spatial Models (QSMs) focusing on urban economics and economic geography. Participants will engage with core concepts of neoclassical urban economics, spatial equilibrium frameworks, and general equilibrium models that integrate labor and land markets. The course emphasizes hands-on learning and covers key techniques for managing spatial data and solving spatial general equilibrium models. Designed for PhD students, master’s students, and postdocs in economics, urban studies, and related fields, the workshop culminates in a capstone project that simulates the impacts of transport infrastructure projects. By the end of the workshop, participants will have the skills to apply QSM methods to analyze counterfactual spatial shocks and policies.

This course will engage with the theory and practice of planning and public policy making, examining how these two fields intersect and are evolving in the context of current national and global priorities including challenges to the dominant paradigms of neoliberalism and globalization as well as the passage of historic legislation in the U.S. in the past year. Classic literature in these fields will be augmented with readings and discussions around themes relevant to the current context such as race, ethnicity and equity, sustainability, labor, industrial strategy and inclusive growth, innovation and equity and geographic diversity.  The course will bring in speakers across these topics in the form of policymakers and planners from cities and states across the US as well as in the federal government to learn how they are planning and implementing new policies, how this has changed if at all compared to the past, and how they are positioned to potentially access and invest the unprecedented new federal funding that will be coming to cities and states in the next 5-10 years. Students will write multiple policy memos on relevant topics throughout the course as well as be paired with partner cities/states to develop in-depth briefs for policymakers and community leaders on ‘ideas and issues to consider’ when applying for and implementing new federal programs and policies.  

Addressing climate change and the transition to a net zero economy will require large scale financing across multiple sectors and for a diverse set of projects. This course will provide graduate students with knowledge and skills specific to financing projects and creating financial institutions, polices and tools to accelerate the transition to a net zero economy while also advancing racial and economic equity. Topics covered will include:  1) the varied financing tools, products and services used in green finance; 2) how mission-driven financial intermediaries work and different intermediary models applicable to green finance;  3) the financing needs and issues of different economic/energy use sectors and the role of green finance in addressing them;  and 4) explore how to address systemic racism in the finance system and advance racial and economic justice through green finance.  Students will work on a client project to gain experience in designing proposals/solutions to address a green financing need or problem.

Every landscape represents an incomplete or interrupted plan that tells time and intention. Physical landscapes provide evidence of successful, failed and emergent development plans, but only the learned eye sees beyond the material culture of the street. “Death” offers a way to conceptualize the unseen, underground, the underneath, the liminal space between what we know, what is actual and what is yet to be. Linking social theory, geography, public policy and planning history, this course asks: How can planners and critical observers of the built environment begin to access the collection of meanings that script the movement, stasis and location of everyday users? In other words, how do we move beyond official maps, plans and histories to consider contested meanings of place as they are lived, exchanged and created. Through weekly examinations of first person documentary accounts including ethnography, historical fiction, autobiography, film and novels, students will analyze the social, political and geographic impact of various land development strategies in the U.S. and beyond. Displacement defines a major theme of this course -- students will examine: 1) How does this happen? 2) What have been subsequent local responses? And, 3) What are the lasting consequences of population dispersals? 

Informed by ethnographic method and archival immersion, this course will provide students with an interdisciplinary framework for identifying and describing the social impact of place-based change and capital movement. Students will develop a critical understanding of urban planning informed by resident-authored analysis across time and space.

An exploration of blackness in its rich varieties—as material, as mood, as color, as absence (of light), as presence (of racial identity)—and its possibilities in architecture, landscape architecture, urban planning, and art. Participants will pay close attention to sophisticated, complex understandings of blackness in multiple disciplines, and will delve into blackness as aesthetic expression and cultural expression, interacting with approaches that expand and deepen how they employ blackness in their work. Participants will create a body of interdisciplinary work, with blackness as major and minor key as they build to a final project that's a visual narrative at the intersection of art and their specialization.

Examines how cities are applying artificial intelligence to enhance service delivery, engage with constituents, and optimize administration. Introduces students to AI methods and tools being used in fields such as transportation, public safety, and urban planning. Explores AI's challenges in areas including privacy, security, fairness, and transparency, and the policy strategies that governments can use to mitigate these risks. Features guest lectures from government and industry experts leading real-world AI initiatives. No specific technical background is required. For the final project, students develop proposals for AI-driven solutions to specific challenges in their own cities.

The objective of this IAP course is to address the question: how in overall terms can we improve transportation systems – not just the technology, but the underlying human systems – using data? Subsidiary questions include: what can data do, and what can’t it do? What do practitioners need to know about the data now available: where does it come from? How is it generated? Who owns it? How can it be used for decision-making? What skills are needed? What do different segments of society – the public sector, the private sector, individual travelers – need to do? What are the challenges? What can be learned from history, and from other disciplines?

This course is designed to slot in between existing course offerings that cover technical topics (like data analysis, modeling, visualization, and optimization) and equity/social-justice issues, providing students an opportunity to develop their own understanding of transportation data and its applications, so that they can give full consideration to the technical and social approaches covered in other classes.

A single focus question will be presented as the basis for the course’s primary case study: how many transportation fatalities occurred in the U.S. in 2022? This will require not simple data crunching, but thoughtful “human” analysis using questions such as those above, since the point of the course is to demonstrate that there is no single, authoritative answer, and that students’ critical application of understanding the entire data lifecycle is key to approaching professional challenges.

This “Real Estate Action Lab” practicum will be a joint practicum/action learning course between Department of Urban Studies and Planning (DUSP), Center for Real Estate (CRE) and the Sloan School (MBA Program).
This practicum highlights the cross-disciplinary skills (urban design and planning, policy, real estate, economics, finance, and business) in addressing complex challenges in nowadays’ urban development and real estate industry. Students from DUSP, CRE and Sloan MBA will be mixed up so that they can learn from each other, and this will also help them develop cross-culture and cross-disciplinary management skills.

In Spring 2025, the theme will be “climate responsive real estate”. In today's rapidly evolving real estate landscape, sustainability and climate resilience have emerged as critical factors shaping investment and development decisions. As global concerns about climate change intensify, the real estate industry faces unprecedented challenges and opportunities to innovate. Sustainable real estate practices not only mitigate environmental impact but also enhance long-term asset value through energy efficiency, resource conservation, and the integration of green technologies. Meanwhile, climate-responsive and resilient real estate focuses on creating buildings and communities that are better equipped to withstand the increasing risks of extreme weather events and changing environmental conditions.

Students taking this practicum will have the opportunity to engage in hands-on projects with one of two clients, who are national leaders in sustainable real estate development and investment strategies. Students will work in multi-disciplinary teams on the following topics and challenges raised by the client:  sustainable investment strategy, green building certification and energy retrofitting, energy efficiency of project-community integration, and decarbonization of residential and office assets in portfolios. Students will work with emerging technology to design high quality, evidence-based sustainable investment and climate responsive real estate proposals for our clients. The results of this practicum will have great potential to inform climate responsive asset management and sustainable investment strategies.

Instructors:
Siqi Zheng (Professor, MIT DUSP and CRE, email: sqzheng@mit.edu)
Jake Cohen (Senior Associate Dean and Senior Lecturer, MIT Sloan, email: jcohen28@mit.edu)

Clients and Project Locations: Developers/Owners of Multi-family and Office buildings in Washington D.C. and Massachusetts
Necessary Skills: No requirement for urban design skills. Knowledge and interest in urban and real estate development, finance and management, environmental planning and policy, or urban science are preferred.