Subjects

This under/graduate-level reading seminar focuses on the critical intersections between Indigenous knowledge systems, water resources management, and environmental jus-tice. The course centers readings in genres of Indigenous futurisms to cover the basics of Indigenous water and energy planning. Through the lens of these genres, guest lec-tures, discussions, and case studies, students will understand the emergent trends in the development of traditional ecological knowledge. At the end of the course, students will propose speculative projects to scale community-based water planning interventions and initiatives towards utility scale to support the sovereignty and self-determination of In-digenous governments.

Considers challenges to democratic governance in contemporary India. Practices critical reading, thinking and communication skills. Builds community with those concerned about democracy in India and elsewhere at a time of multiple challenges. 

The motivating idea for this course is that a critical reading of Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities can facilitate a deeper understanding and appreciation of cities and the urban planning and policy making process. Asking the existential question “What’s a City?”, we will use Invisible Cities and a variety of weekly readings to attempt to contemplate answer(s) to that question, and illuminate the process of urban planning and policymaking, with a focus on the transportation sector. The course is designed to help each of us (instructor included) think more clearly and precisely about cities, the important role of urban renewal and its role in the post-pandemic 21st century context, and the ways we approach the necessary task of urban (and transit) adaptation. We will use Boston as a case study to examine the planning process, and compare the process and outcomes of mid-20th century urban renewal with the ways cities are dealing with post- pandemic renewal.

Combines state-of-the-art research on evictions and displacement globally (in the context of the global crisis of evictions, land grabbing, and gentrification) with the study of policy and practical responses to displacement, assisted by selected case studies. First half covers explanations about the mechanisms and drivers of displacement, while the second half introduces and evaluates policy and legal responses developed by many actors. Analyzes the use of UN and national standards on displacement as well as the use of tools such as the Eviction Impact Assessment Tool.

Urban analytics draws upon statistics, visualization, and computation to better understand and ultimately shape cities. This course emphasizes telling stories about cities and neighborhoods covering a set of fundamental concepts of descriptive approaches, quantitative and spatial analysis in R, and principles of reproducible data analysis. Students learn to communicate the results of visualization and analysis for use in decision-making and policy development and to critique those processes.

Develops logical, empirically based arguments using statistical techniques and analytic methods. covers elementary statistics, probability, and other types of quantitative reasoning useful for description, estimation, comparison, and explanation. Emphasis on the use and limitations of analytical techniques in planning practice. Restricted to first-year MCP students. Students are required to attend one of the three scheduled recitation sections.

The motivating idea for this course is that a critical reading of Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities can facilitate a deeper understanding and appreciation of cities and the urban planning and policy making process. Asking the existential question “What’s a City?”, we will use Invisible Cities and a variety of weekly readings to attempt to contemplate answer(s) to that question, and illuminate the process of urban planning and policymaking, with a focus on the transportation sector. The course is designed to help each of us (instructor included) think more clearly and precisely about cities, the important role of urban renewal and its role in the post-pandemic 21st century context, and the ways we approach the necessary task of urban (and transit) adaptation. We will use Boston as a case study to examine the planning process, and compare the process and outcomes of mid-20th century urban renewal with the ways cities are dealing with post- pandemic renewal.

The city is shaped by movement--on foot and wheels, in cars and ships and planes--and forces us to reshape our relationship to it and each other based on how we interact, or fail to, via transport. The movement facilitated by transportation exhilarates us, frustrates us, and plunges us into the excitement and malaise of city life at the pace that absorbs or removes us from its dynamics. The physical experience of the city organized by transportation creates mental maps that influence our psychology of the city, as our imagination and emotions respond to how we are included or excluded, whether we are allowed to walk or pulled over for daring to drive, whether we have a bird's-eye view or experience the texture up close. This class aims to examine the kaleidoscope of city life, especially its inequalities and inequities, by looking at how we are moved--physically and emotionally--or turned off by transportation. It does so through a mix of intensive reading, field explorations, and writing and design projects (no previous experience necessary) that will delve into asking who has the right to the city and how can transportation be approached in a fresh way to ask basic questions about freedom and equity.

Urban analytics draws upon statistics, visualization, and computation to better understand and ultimately shape cities. This course emphasizes telling stories about cities and neighborhoods covering a set of fundamental concepts of descriptive approaches, quantitative and spatial analysis in R, and principles of reproducible data analysis. Students learn to communicate the results of visualization and analysis for use in decision-making and policy development and to critique those processes.

This course offers a cross-disciplinary introduction to the archive as a site of contestation, erasure and possibility for students, planning practitioners and local communities seeking innovative models for city justice and reconciliation. Combining academic theory with client-engaged practice, this course gives students a hands-on learning opportunity to tackle ground level issues with real stakeholders in real time. Co-taught by a textile artist-historian and archival educator, students will be presented with a set of woven documents highlighting the major themes of the course: collective agency, social activism and diverse histories of resistance and disruption. Students will learn how to analyze these woven documents in order to become more nuanced readers of a variety of cultural objects including landscapes, urban plans and social histories spanning Toronto, Boston and Rochester (New York). This course will ultimately provide students with a research and action framework intent on destabilizing colonial modes of data extraction by re-centering community-driven design and use.

The practicum, “THE RESILIENT CITIES AND TOWNS OF JAPAN,” aims to examine the complex challenges of urban and rural shrinkage in Japan, including depopulation, aging populations, and disaster risks. Led by Professor of Urban Design and Public Policy Brent D. Ryan and in collaboration with Professor Takefumi Kurose, Professor Kenichi Yabuki, and Kyushu University, the practicum is open to MCP students, with priority given to MCP students who need practicum credit for graduation and to MCP students with relevant skill sets and interests. The practicum will engage with local communities at different scales in Kyushu to understand the impact of top-down measures from the government and grassroots measures being taken for communities. 

The practicum is client-based research and interacts with local communities and stakeholders. Students will engage with local communities and regional stakeholders involved in drafting planning policies for the Location Optimization Plan and mobility technology introductions at the sites. The course will have an interdisciplinary teaching team, organizing site visits, meetings with stakeholders, lectures, and workshops in several locations in Kyushu. Students will learn about built environment planning strategies, methods to map and visualize small towns, and normative frameworks to guide development trajectories. 

The project aims to provide insights into the effectiveness and issues of various policies and initiatives implemented by local governments in Japan to address the challenges faced by shrinking cities, promoting social and physical resilience. Students will produce comprehensive reports documenting their observation and analysis of shrinking cities in Japan, including planning proposals that provide guidance on how to promote social and physical resilience in built environments. Students will produce presentations and reports that share their findings with the wider academic community, facilitate educational exchanges between students and practitioners in Japan and other countries, and organize a presentation to academic partners and community members in a shrinking city of Japan. 

Overall, the practicum will enable students to gain a deeper understanding of the complex challenges faced by shrinking cities in Japan and the innovative solutions being developed to address them. Additionally, the project can provide guidance on best practices in urban planning and development, promoting social and physical resilience, and bridging the gaps between top-down and bottom-up approaches to urban planning and development.

Making Good on Baltimore as a Just City: Building Solutions For A Vacant Housing Crisis will be a field study and community development course.  The client for this practicum is Fight Blight Baltimore.  This practicum seeks to rethink the stakeholder engagement concept in vacant housing underutilized infrastructure in Baltimore using Citizen Engineers to explore the resident perspective in the city’s neighborhood stabilization initiatives. As an example of hyper-segregated urbanism, Baltimore also provides an opportunity to rethink how physical spaces in neighborhoods can be reimagined to be just.

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.  

Run jointly between DUSP and the Martin Trust Center for MIT Entrepreneurship, this is an immersive, student-led academic trip across the American southeast, which explores the history of the civil rights movement, as well as its contemporary legacy. The purpose of this course is to bear witness to the civil rights movement by walking in the footsteps of those who put their lives on the line to fight for racial freedom and justice to deepen each student’s understanding of systemic inequality, improve their perspective on effective leadership and entrepreneurship, and develop their ability to craft solutions with a diversity equity and inclusion lenses. Course includes a trip over IAP. Application based.

This summer urban design workshop is part of a historic urban design collaboration and student exchange between MIT and Tsinghua University in Beijing, started in 1985. The 2024 workshop will focus on adaptive reuse of industrial heritage in Tangshan. 

Tangshan is located in the Hebei Province, about an hour east of Beijing on high-speed rail. With an urban population of 3.6 million residents (2020) and provincial population of 7.7, Tangshan has historically been China’s largest steel-production city. In the latter part of the 20th century, its economy has diversified to manufacturing machinery, motor-vehicles, petroleum products and cement. It also boasts significant textile and pottery manufacturing. 

Today, as the Chinese economy transitions from a heavy manufacturing base to a more service and knowledge-based economy, the future of cities like Tangshan face uncertainty and call for a different economic, social and natural habitat. This workshop will investigate ecological approaches to reusing industrial heritage sites, community-oriented and people-centric city design, modernization of historic panel housing districts and their neighborhood amenities, and possible pathways to shift urban mobility towards more sustainable modes. We invite a joint group of MIT and Tsinghua graduate students to examine Tangshan’s present transformational challenges and to propose urban designs, plans and policies to address the city’s and its communities’ development challenges. 

During our trip to China from June 15 to 28th, we will collaborate with Tsinghua students and faculty (Prof. Liu Jian) to understand the challenges faced by Tangshan, and spend time in both Beijing and Tangshan. Travel and accommodation will be fully funded by MIT. Participating students must be present in the workshop throughout the whole travel period and are expected to work and engage in site visits and tours during full 8-hour days for two work weeks, including one weekend in the middle of the trip.

Considers challenges to democratic governance in contemporary India. Practices critical reading, thinking and communication skills. Builds community with those concerned about democracy in India and elsewhere at a time of multiple challenges. 

This under/graduate-level reading seminar focuses on the critical intersections between Indigenous knowledge systems, water resources management, and environmental jus-tice. The course centers readings in genres of Indigenous futurisms to cover the basics of Indigenous water and energy planning. Through the lens of these genres, guest lec-tures, discussions, and case studies, students will understand the emergent trends in the development of traditional ecological knowledge. At the end of the course, students will propose speculative projects to scale community-based water planning interventions and initiatives towards utility scale to support the sovereignty and self-determination of In-digenous governments.

This course is for students interested in understanding private market real estate transactions. It will cover a range of topics, including the formation of real estate private equity funds, investor profiles, capital raising, partnership and fee structures, return allocation mechanisms, waterfall calculations, taxation, and approaches to solving complex situations encountered by owners of private equity assets and investing in private asset-backed companies. Students will investigate real estate private equity transactions with an emphasis on whether to pursue a specific transaction or not based on its investment risks and merits. They will be expected to form well-reasoned arguments in support of their qualitative and quantitative positions with respect to some interesting transaction situations to be evaluated in this course.

Large data sets and novel computational tools have been bringing new perspectives on research on real estate. In this seminar we will explore how data science methods (including machine learning, computer vision) have been adopted by the real estate industry and by researchers. We will covered topics including how climate change affects real estate, the use of computer vision methods to assess people’s perception of neighborhoods and how it affects property values, and how data science approach can combine data sets from multiple sources and make sense them, informing real estate decisions. Students will have access to data platforms (such as StateBook) throughout the semester while they put together their own presentations for the last class.

This discussion-based seminar offers an introduction to the history of capitalism and a broad overview of debates concerning its impacts on social life, with a particular focus on the modern American experience. The United States occupies a central position in today’s capitalist global system and has played a key role in shaping both the development of capitalism and critical responses to its advance. Drawing on primary historical documents and secondary literature from multiple disciplines, the course examines capitalism’s relationships to race, class, and gender, as well as the impacts of business and government, nature and environment, and finance and technology on economic transformation in the United States and beyond.

Please contact ?  Contact Profs. Caley Horan (cdhoran@mit.edu) and  Jason Jackson (jbrj@mit.edu) for details.

The course introduces students to digital approaches for material flow determination and resilient urban recovery, with particular attention to on-site solutions and local capacity building. Through this study, we will develop solutions for remote damage assessment for cities that have suffered from Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine after February 2022. We will use digital tools (image segmentation), GIS analysis, and a historical overview of the local nature, ecology, culture, and architecture to develop ideas for reusing available materials from destroyed, damaged, and abandoned buildings, preserving heritage and architectural code. We will also examine the effects of Soviet and Russian colonial rule on Ukrainian city development, exploring decolonization strategies to address these historical impacts. This practical, hands-on course will use the Sviatohirsk municipality and the context of the broader Donetsk Region as a case study.