Too often writing is treated as peripheral rather than central to scholarship—it’s the drudgery that follows the important work of curiosity, research, analysis—but this mischaracterization is to the peril of the scholar. The craft of writing is also a crucial means of deepening academic research and presentation, developing scholarly communities, and developing habits of socialization into an academic field. This seminar will focus on writing for an audience that is broader than those huddled around one’s specialization—as the scholar and journalist Carlo Rotella once described it, an audience of “people in other buildings on campus.” We will work on producing compelling narrative, and will explore what it means—plus learn how—to write for an audience beyond one’s academic field. We will work on growing as writers and as editors who focus on structure, character, voice, tone, scenes, description, and fact-checking to produce more robust scholarship as we become more attuned to the relationship between scholarly discourse and research and socialization into one’s discipline. We will have visits from some of the country’s best scholars, writers, and editors, who will share their experiences and insights to expand our ambitions and lift our sights on what writing can accomplish.

Prerequisites/Co-requisites: An application letter Send a letter (of no more than 700 words) describing your academic research and interests, areas of intellectual focus, and related curiosities. All participants are required to work on an academic paper, journal article, dissertation chapter, book chapter, or magazine article rooted in academic research. Say what writing you will bring to the seminar and what you hope to accomplish with it, and discuss any interests in the seminar beyond improving your writing.

The nocturnal city has too often been presented as a zone of danger, licentiousness, and crime. But the city at night is more than the sum of our fears: it’s a time of mystery, romance, exploration, creativity, labor, and urban regeneration. This writing-intensive seminar aims to recover the many meanings and multiple possibilities of the night, exploring how our understandings of culture, urban development, social and economic exclusion, climate, and governance are deepened by a close look at the night. Through a study of the night—and by delving into fields such as night-studies, journalism, art history, sociology--we will explore the politics and poetics of the city—via literature, music, film art, architecture, urban planning—and raise new questions and possibilities for how to plan and design for the city at night and the many who flee from and run to it.

Prerequisites/Co-requisites: Application letter required: In no more than 750 words, explain your interest in the course and how the city reveals itself to you with more complexity at night, discussing a work—architecture, art, literature, film, song—that you find especially moving in how it explains or reveals the character of the city at night.

Enrollment Limitations: Class maximum of twelve students, all of whom are only admitted via consideration of their application essays.

This course is an advanced doctoral workshop on the political economy of climate change. The workshop aims to provide Ph.D. students working on climate change, across sectors and disciplines, with a foundation in the theoretical and methodological approaches of polit-ical economy to conceptualize and conduct independent research. Substantively, the work-shop takes a critical political economy approach to the climate crisis and examines three in-terrelated dimensions: (1) the political governance challenge of mobilizing climate action, given the need to design new institutional mechanisms to address the global and intergener-ational distributional aspects of climate change; (2) the economic challenge of devising new institutional approaches to equitably finance climate action in ways that go beyond the cur-rently dominant economic rationale; and (3) the cultural challenge – and opportunity – of empowering an adaptive socio-cultural ecology through traditional knowledge and local-level social networks to achieve climate resilience. 

An historical and cross-cultural study of the logics and practices of intervention: the ways that individuals, institutions, and governments identify conditions of need or states of emergency within and across borders that require a response. Examines when a response is viewed as obligatory, when is it deemed unnecessary, and by whom; when the intercession is considered fulfilled; and the rationales or assumptions that are employed in assessing interventions. Theories of the state, globalization, and humanitarianism; power, policy, and institutions; gender, race, and ethnicity; and law, ethics, and morality are examined.

This special subject studies the impact of information and communication technologies (ICT) on community life, policy making and governance by addressing current major issues and research questions regarding e-Planning, Urban Information Systems, and Urban Science.  The subject meets weekly on Thursdays for 1.5 hours and is linked to (a) weekly Monday lunch talks (Speaker Series) on “Urban Science and Digital Transition: e-Planning twenty years later “ and (b) a day-long “International Conference on Public Participation and Information Technologies” on November 10.
 
New technologies enable more efficient delivery of urban services, broader public participation, more empowerment of diverse constituencies, and improved government transparency. Yet social inequality and wealth concentration have worsened, action on climate integrity is meager, and trends in who collects and controls the vast amounts of new data risks privatizing public goods, increasing surveillance, and threatening democratic governance. So what explains the difference? We focus on planning and policy-making concerning two major inter-connected transitions: Energy & Digital. e-Planning studies Digital technology in planning, but also the Transition: where we stand, and where it will lead us.
 
In 2003, MIT's DUSP offered the first e-Planning Seminar. Significant changes in the past 20 years require that we improve our multi-disciplinary understanding of ICT-driven changes in our daily lives and the ways in which we construct and regulate our communities.  This special subject is a unique opportunity to reflect on where we have been as well as where we are headed through discussion that includes the original 2003 seminar organizers. Theoretical linkages between urban science, digital economics and digital politics will be explored to address issues like Geography of Inequality, Digital Sovereignty, Technology Innovation and Property Rights, The Cost of "Free", new models of Politics and Business, Privacy & Liberties vs. Efficiency & Security, Digital Inclusion, Local Government and Citizen Empowerment, Urban Mobility and Smart Cities.
 
Students will attend Seminar and Symposium talks (or their recorded video), participate in small-group discussion, and write two short reports commenting on one or more talks, and proposing a researchable ‘urban science’ based question, hypothesis, or planning strategy regarding the next twenty years. An option will be to present a communication at the Symposium, and / or contribute to the main collective product of the Fall's e-Planning Seminar Series, namely, a Book on "e-Planning for Digital Transition with no one left behind.

This special subject studies the impact of information and communication technologies (ICT) on community life, policy making and governance by addressing current major issues and research questions regarding e-Planning, Urban Information Systems, and Urban Science.  The subject meets weekly on Thursdays for 1.5 hours and is linked to (a) weekly Monday lunch talks (Speaker Series) on “Urban Science and Digital Transition: e-Planning twenty years later “ and (b) a day-long “International Conference on Public Participation and Information Technologies” on November 10.
 
New technologies enable more efficient delivery of urban services, broader public participation, more empowerment of diverse constituencies, and improved government transparency. Yet social inequality and wealth concentration have worsened, action on climate integrity is meager, and trends in who collects and controls the vast amounts of new data risks privatizing public goods, increasing surveillance, and threatening democratic governance. So what explains the difference? We focus on planning and policy-making concerning two major inter-connected transitions: Energy & Digital. e-Planning studies Digital technology in planning, but also the Transition: where we stand, and where it will lead us.
 
In 2003, MIT's DUSP offered the first e-Planning Seminar. Significant changes in the past 20 years require that we improve our multi-disciplinary understanding of ICT-driven changes in our daily lives and the ways in which we construct and regulate our communities.  This special subject is a unique opportunity to reflect on where we have been as well as where we are headed through discussion that includes the original 2003 seminar organizers. Theoretical linkages between urban science, digital economics and digital politics will be explored to address issues like Geography of Inequality, Digital Sovereignty, Technology Innovation and Property Rights, The Cost of "Free", new models of Politics and Business, Privacy & Liberties vs. Efficiency & Security, Digital Inclusion, Local Government and Citizen Empowerment, Urban Mobility and Smart Cities.
 
Students will attend Seminar and Symposium talks (or their recorded video), participate in small-group discussion, and write two short reports commenting on one or more talks, and proposing a researchable ‘urban science’ based question, hypothesis, or planning strategy regarding the next twenty years. An option will be to present a communication at the Symposium, and / or contribute to the main collective product of the Fall's e-Planning Seminar Series, namely, a Book on "e-Planning for Digital Transition with no one left behind.

City Design Research Module 1 for Joint Urban Design Studio, weeks 1-7.

The joint urban design studio will be offered as 2 modules beginning in spring 2023. Module 1 is the city design research part (7 weeks + spring break trip); Module 2 is the continuation of the design studio (additional 7 weeks = 14 total weeks). The new modular system, especially module 1, is geared towards DUSP students who want to go through the design research and project programming phase of a joint urban design studio, at the city scale, but do not necessarily want to produce their own site design projects in the end. This will allow planning students to work within the real world capacity of the planner or urban designer through ‘informing’ the studio’s design project goals and parameters. Module 1 students will work in mixed collaborative groups with students enrolled for the full semester studio.

Module 1 (sign up only for 11.S942) City Design Research, is 12 credits (0-6-6) and is 7 weeks long including attendance on the class studio trip during spring break (location TBD, costs covered). Module 1 is created for those students who want to learn how to conduct research on a metropolitan scale to find and identify future design projects to bring to the attention of stakeholders. This module will focus on ‘reading’ the metro landscape through analytical representation and mapping, landscape and infrastructural thinking, quantifying waste and redundancies in the urban fabric, discovering where new equity and programming can be infilled, and how to build advocacy and communication with potential stakeholder groups. The recommendations from students in Module 1 will form the basis for design studio projects that students will conduct in Module 2. While students who only sign up for Module 1 will technically be done with the course at the end of the 7-week module, they are expected to participate in one class review during Module 2 for the students who sign up for both modules (the whole joint urban design studio).

Module 2 is for students who wish to continue into the design studio portion of the class for 21 total credits (0-12-9) or the whole semester. Students cannot sign up for module 2 individually. You must either sign up for module 1, or module 1+2 (or the entire 21 credit studio).

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 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.

Examines efforts in developing and advanced nations and regions. Examines key issues in the current and future development of urban energy systems, such as technology, use, behavior, regulation, climate change, and lack of access or energy poverty. Case studies on a diverse sampling of cities explore how prospective technologies and policies can be implemented. Includes intensive group research projects, discussion, and debate.