Reviews and analyzes federal and state regulation of air and water pollution, hazardous waste, green-house gas emissions, and the production and use of toxic chemicals. Analyzes pollution as an economic problem and the failure of markets. Explores the role of science and economics in legal decisions.

Provides an opportunity for MIT students to become certified in methods of assessing the vulnerability of public agencies (particularly agencies that manage critical urban infrastructure) to the risk of cyberattack. Certification involves completing an 8-hour, self-paced, online set of four modules during the first four weeks of the semester followed by a competency exam.

Explores the physical, ecological, technological, political, economic and cultural implications of big plans and mega-urban landscapes in a global context. Uses local and international case studies to understand the process of making major changes to urban landscape and city fabric, and to regional landscape systems. Includes lectures by leading practitioners.

Immerses students in the process of building and testing their own digital and board games in order to better understand how we learn from games. Explores the design and use of games in the classroom in addition to research and development issues associated with computer-based (desktop and handheld) and non-computer-based media.

Studies financing tools and program models to support and promote local economic development and housing. Overview of public and private capital markets and financing sources helps illustrate market imperfections that constrain economic and housing development. Explores federal housing and economic development programs as well as state and local public finance tools.

Examines the built, psychosocial, economic, and natural environment factors that affect health behaviors and outcomes. Introduces tools designed to integrate public health considerations into policymaking and planning. Provides extensive practical training in the application of health impact assessment (HIA) methodology, which brings a health lens to policy, budgeting, and planning debates.

Examines the behavioral foundation for policy design using urban transportation examples. Introduces multiple frameworks for understanding behavior while contrasting the perspectives of classic economic theory with behavioral economics and social psychology. Suggests corresponding policy interventions and establishes a mapping across behavior, theory, and policy.

An introduction to the research and empirical analysis of urban planning issues using geographic information systems. Extensive hands-on exercises provide experience with various techniques in spatial analysis and querying databases.

Introduces basic economic analysis for planning students including the functioning of markets, the allocation of scarce resources among competing uses, profit maximizing behavior in different market structures. Course illustrates theory with contemporary economic issues.

Explores the evolution of poverty and economic security in the US within a global context. Examines the impacts of recent economic restructuring and globalization. Reviews current debates about the fate of the middle class, sources of increasing inequality, and approaches to advancing economic opportunity and security. Students taking graduate version complete additional assignments.

This course introduces students to Participatory Action Research (PAR), which is an approach to research and inquiry that enables communities to examine and address consequential societal problems.

Examines how the development of the built environment produces and reproduces conceptions of race - sociobiological theories of human difference.

Seminar dissects ten transportation studies from head to toe to illustrate how research ideas are initiated, framed, analyzed, evidenced, written, presented, criticized, revised, extended, and published, quoted and applied. Students design and execute their own transportation research.

Explores specific challenges of urban last-mile B2C and B2B distribution in both industrialized and emerging economies. Develops an in-depth understanding of the perspectives, roles, and decisions of all relevant stakeholder groups, from consumers to private sector decision makers and public policy makers.

Provides an opportunity for MIT students to become certified in methods of assessing the vulnerability of public agencies (particularly agencies that manage critical urban infrastructure) to the risk of cyberattack. Certification involves completing an 8-hour, self-paced, online set of four modules during the first four weeks of the semester followed by a competency exam.

Introduces a range of practical approaches involved in evaluating and planning sites within the context of natural and cultural systems. Develops the knowledge and skills to analyze and plan a site for development through exercises and an urban design project.

Examines the urban environment as a natural phenomenon, human habitat, medium of expression, and forum for action. Subject has two related, major themes: how ideas of nature influence the way cities are perceived, designed, built, and managed; and how natural processes and urban form interact and the consequences of these for human health safety and welfare.

Focuses on the economic foundations of innovation, trace innovation to the primary and secondary commercial real estate markets, and survey products, spaces and technologies in the commercial real estate development pipeline of today and beyond. Candidly discusses the challenges faced by innovators in the real estate innovation domain.

Examines the complex development of cities through history by tracing a diachronic accumulation of forms and spaces in specific cities, and showing how significant ideas were made manifest across distinct geographies and cultures. Emphasizes how economic, spiritual, political, geographic and technological forces have simultaneously shaped and, in turn, been influenced by the city. 

Investigates the relationship between states and markets in the evolution of modern capitalism.

Studies financing tools and program models to support and promote local economic development and housing. Overview of public and private capital markets and financing sources helps illustrate market imperfections that constrain economic and housing development. Explores federal housing and economic development programs as well as state and local public finance tools.

Examines dynamic relationship among key actors: beneficiaries, government, and funder. Emphasis on cost recovery, affordability, replicability, user selection, and project administration. Extensive case examples provide basis for comparisons. In person not required.

Informs and prepares students to navigate the explicit and implicit power dynamics among stakeholders in decision-making processes that govern the planning and delivery of water and sanitation systems.

Explores relationships between built environments and memory to consider the spaces and spatial practices in which the future of the past is imagined, negotiated, and contested.

Half 2 class.

Reviews and analyzes federal and state regulation of air and water pollution, hazardous waste, green-house gas emissions, and the production and use of toxic chemicals. Analyzes pollution as an economic problem and the failure of markets. Explores the role of science and economics in legal decisions.

Required subject intended solely for 1st-year DUSP PhD students. Develops capacity of doctoral students to become independent scholars by helping them to prepare their first-year papers and plan for their dissertation work. Focuses on the process by which theory, research questions, literature reviews, and new data are synthesized into new and original contributions to the literature.

Familiarizes students with the practice of planning, by requiring actual experience in professional internship placements. Enables students to both apply what they are learning in their classes in an actual professional setting and to reflect, using a variety of platforms, on the learning personal and professional - growing out of their internship experience.

Demography is said to be destiny. A new longevity economy is emerging. While all nations are aging, studies indicate that nearly half of the children born in industrialized economies will live over 100 years. By 2047, there may be more adults over 60 years old then children under 15 worldwide. Planning and preparing for a 100-year society is a major challenge for government and business.

The course investigates the interaction between pedestrian activity, urban form and land-use patterns in relatively dense urban environments. Informed by recent literature on pedestrian mobility, behavior and biases, we take a hands-on view and learn how to operationalize and model pedestrian activity in built environments using software tools and analysis methods.

This course introduces computational thinking and applied data science practice related to urban domain. Students learn principles, tools, and techniques of using data for urban problem-solving through hands-on exercises in Python.

Demography is said to be destiny. A new longevity economy is emerging. While all nations are aging, studies indicate that nearly half of the children born in industrialized economies will live over 100 years. By 2047, there may be more adults over 60 years old then children under 15 worldwide. Planning and preparing for a 100-year society is a major challenge for government and business.

This workshop explores cross-jurisdictional climate change policies and their effects on equity and socially vulnerable populations. The course examines factors of greatest concern in adapting cities to climate change including infrastructure, energy food and water systems, health, housing and environmental justice. The course will review climate change hazards and social vulnerability to clima

The modern city—with its attractive industry, remarkable vitality, strange solitudes, and wide and varied human contrasts—gathers peoples and forces with such dynamism that it can seem as incomprehensible as it is interesting. How, then, does one see the city in its varied complexity with a rich understanding of the lives and institutions and sensibilities that animate it?

Survey of the latest transportation research offered by 12 MIT faculty each presenting their on-going research. Students are required to attend the classes, read the assigned articles, and write a brief reflection memo.  

Housing is in crisis globally, from a pandemic of evictions, lack of affordability, increasing homelessness, precarious living in informal settlements, increasing segregation and increasing commodification of land and housing.  In this first-ever clinic at DUSP, a housing justice perspective will be used to engage with the multiple dimensions of the global housing crisis, including during the C