MIT DUSP

We just launched our free online program – called Just Money! This digital MIT course invites you to a learning journey on values-based financial institutions around the world. Do you know what your bank does with your money? What is the role of a bank in producing societal well-being? This course looks into banks that operate differently, namely, “just banks" that use capital and finance as a tool to address social and ecological challenges.

This course is for anyone who wants to understand the unique role banks play as intermediaries in our economy and how they can leverage that position to produce positive social, environmental, and economic change.

The instructors of this course have worked for over 15 years with just banks from around the world, as well as in the fields of community development, economic democracy, and social change.

No previous knowledge of finance or banking is needed to take this course. Enroll by simply signing up here: https://mitxonline.mit.edu/courses/course-v1:MITxT+11.405x/

We live in a time of “polycrisis”: multiple protracted, compounded, and interconnected crises that produce conditions of profound uncertainty, volatility, and fragility in contemporary cities. In Projections 18, co-editors Chen Chu, Chenab Navalkha, and Mrinalini Penumaka aim to bring together urban scholarship that empirically characterizes and explains aspects of this multiplicity of crises, at varying temporalities, scales, and geographies.

Learn more about the forthcoming volume and the call of papers: https://bit.ly/projections18Call

Projections is the annual peer-reviewed journal produced by the , published by The MIT Press.

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On Monday, June 3rd, three exceptional staff members of the MIT community were honored with Infinite Mile Awards. The awards were presented at a celebratory event to 's Janine Marchese (pictured) as well as Art, Culture, and Technology program at MIT’s Gearóid Dolan and MIT Department of Architecture's Tessa Haynes.

Part of the Institute-wide MIT Rewards and Recognition program, MIT School of Architecture + Planning’s Infinite Mile Award is given to individuals–or teams–whose contributions are particularly valuable to advancing the School of Architecture and Planning's core mission of producing first-rate, innovative research, scholarship and teaching.

Please join us in congratulating Janine Marchese, and her colleagues from across the MIT School of Architecture + Planning, on her very well deserved recognition for their dedication and effort on behalf of MIT!

Image credit: Maria Iacobo

When discussing responses to the challenges of , we tend to focus on international negotiations, national agendas, city resilience and adaptation, or the discrete choices we as individuals are making. How might designers and planners intervene at scales that are in between the extremes of large and small scale action?

In a paper for Built Environment, UC Berkeley College of Environmental Design's Zachary Lamb and MIT School of Architecture + Planning's Lawrence Vale re-envision the neighborhood unit as a medium for accelerating equitable responses to climate risks and increasing resilience to climate impacts.

More and read the full paper via Open Access: https://bit.ly/lambValeNeighborhoods

MIT senior Cindy Xie, who majored in MIT DUSP while minoring in MIT Anthropology and MIT Department of Biology, described her study of anthropology as "a way to learn about varied social theories as well as methodologies of critical thinking and reflection."

"My majors and minors at MIT converge around different ways of understanding health and the social and environmental factors influencing it," she continued.

J-WAFS is happy to announce 14 outstanding recipients of our 10th round of seed grant funding for cutting-edge research at MIT. J-WAFS seed grants provide up to $150,000 in funding to selected researchers to support innovative research that has the potential to significantly impact water and food supply challenges for human need.

🎉Congratulations to all:
MIT Department of Urban Studies and Planning at the MIT School of Architecture + Planning.
- Sarah Williams
- Janelle Knox-Hayes
- Gabriella Carolini
- Eran Ben - Joseph
MIT Department of Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences
- Andrew Babbin
MIT Joint Program on the Science and Policy of Global Change
- Jennifer Morris
- Adam Schlosser
- Kenneth Strzepek
MIT Mechanical Engineering
- Sherrie Wang
- Svetlana Boriskina
- John Lienhard
MIT Chemical Engineering (ChemE)
- Kristala L. J. Prather
MIT Department of Biological Engineering
- Christopher Voigt
Program in Science, Technology, and Society at the MIT School of Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences
- Kate Brown

MIT School of Science; MIT School of Engineering; MIT Energy Initiative; MIT Institute for Data, Systems, and Society

Learn more about our recipients and each Seed Grant project here: https://jwafs.mit.edu/news/2024/j-wafs-awards-seed-grants-seven-mit-projects-water-and-food

Interested in joining MIT SA+P?DUSP currently has two new, open positions:

The Norman B. Leventhal Center for Advanced Urbanism (LCAU) is seeking a Lecturer/Researcher focused on design, technology, and urban planning. Folks with a focus on carbon neutral cities, energy transition, and generative AI are particularly encouraged to apply. Learn more: https://bit.ly/lcauLecturerResearcher

Mechanical Engineering (MechE) is seeking a Postdoctoral Associate working at the intersection of urban planning and infrastructure development, engineering, and technology to identify innovation potentials in design and development and ultimately help co-produce solutions addressing critical challenges emergent from the polycrises of climate change and rapid urban growth in the Amazon. Learn more: https://bit.ly/postDocMecheDusp

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Repost from , led by 's Karilyn Crockett:

"Sign up to today to participate and hack the archives on May 4 at MIT! Collaborate with activists, archivists, Boston residents, faith leaders, students and more to tackle key questions around the racial wealth gap and education in Boston. Sign up link in bio! We can’t wait to see you there!

This year we have partnered with 11 incredible local organizations to develop community-driven questions addressing challenges facing Boston communities. Join us on May 4 to co-design the next 50 years of social action! ⭐️ More information is on our website - hackingthearchive.mit.edu

We are so excited to learn and grow with you this year!"

IC: Hacking the Archive

To kick-off , we are thrilled to announce that Heather T. Clark, Senior Director for the Building Sector in the The White House Climate Policy Office, will be joining us as a keynote speaker at the World Real Estate Forum June 17+18! With her extensive expertise in climate policy and technical building solutions, Heather has led groundbreaking decarbonization projects across the US, particularly focusing on affordable housing initiatives to ensure equitable access to clean energy.

Register and save $300 on general admission until April 30: https://www.mitworldreforum.com/

Prior to her current role, Heather spearheaded federal and state climate policy efforts at RMI, where she championed initiatives for equitable decarbonization and led strategies to reduce emissions in existing buildings. As a former affordable housing developer, Heather established innovative green building divisions and implemented large-scale energy retrofit projects, making significant strides in sustainable development.

Heather's experience also includes serving as the first Energy Efficiency Expert on the Massachusetts Energy Efficiency Advisory Council and directing the US Department of Energy's Rebuild America Program in New York State.

We are humbled to welcome Heather, an alumna of the MSRED program, back to share her invaluable insights and experiences with us. Don't miss this opportunity to learn from one of the industry's foremost leaders in climate resilience and sustainable development!

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“While much of the data we need to advocate for communities exists openly it is hard for policy makers to obtain it, and if they can access it, perform the quantitative analysis that shows how well their community measures up to others,” says Sarah Williams, describing the updates to Spatial Equity NYC. "Spatial Equity NYC fills that gap, and by making it easier to see how well your community is doing, thereby making it much easier to advocate for change."

Spatial Equity NYC is a free digital tool, co-created by MIT LCAU & Transportation Alternatives, that maps and analyzes how the amenity of public space is utilized and allocated in New York City. The tool, recently updated and expanded, maps data to each district with comparisons across 24 layers of data to help users understand the resources available and disparities across communities. The tool and its data visualizations were designed to be accessible to a wide range of stakeholders and encourage wider participation in advocating for changes and resources that communities in New York require to be healthy, productive, safe, and joyful spaces.

In addition to Williams other MIT team members include: Hanah Shumway, Enrique Casillas, Adi Kuperschmidt, Linh Nguyen, and Sebastian Ives.

Learn more: https://bit.ly/williamsSeNyc

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Please join us in celebrating and congratulating Adjunct Professor Emeritus Clarence Williams, who was honored at the 50th MIT MLK Celebration Gala by incoming vice president for equity and inclusion Karl Reid (’84, SM ’85) for his leadership and distinguished service to the Institute!

Williams was an assistant to three MIT presidents, served as director of the Office of Minority Education, taught in , initiated the MIT Black History Project, and mentored hundreds of students. Reid was one of those students, and he shared a few of his mentor’s oft repeated phrases:

“Do the work and let the talking take care of itself.”

“Bad ideas kill themselves; great ideas flourish.”

Read Angie Chatman's full coverage of the event and learn more about MLK programs at MIT: https://bit.ly/mlkWilliams

Photo credit: Rita Tinega

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MLK Celebration Gala pays tribute to Martin Luther King Jr. and his writings on “the goal of true education” Members of the MIT community gathered to celebrate the life and legacy of Martin Luther King Jr. Marking 50 years of this annual celebration, the event featured remarks from MIT community members and civil rights activist Janet Moses.

In economically distressed cities, housing stability is depressed by heavy local taxation, weak services, and subsidies to regional sprawl. In low-cost neighborhoods, housing disinvestment and abandonment are prevalent. In recovering areas, investors often hold valuable land out of its best possible use. Are there tools to reduce housing disinvestment in low-cost housing? Can these same tools limit the value of speculation and encourage more productive land use?

The The New York Times recently detailed Detroit’s effort to secure these outcomes by pairing a land value tax with a reduced tax on existing structures, repairs, and building activity. The piece highlights a report and fiscal analysis co-authored by 's Nick Allen and University of Nebraska-Lincoln's Professor John Anderson.

Learn more, access Allen and Anderson's papers, read Conor Dougherty's NYT coverage, and listen to WDET 101.9FM's coverage on Detroit Today via the DUSP website: https://bit.ly/allenLvt

Image credit: Jake Neher, WDET

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Exploring the Relationship Between Public Transit and Housing Affordability - MIT Center for Real Estate Geographically constrained cities often face a pronounced housing affordability challenge due in part to the spatial limitations imposed on their ability to produce additional units in their housing stock. These cities tend to see residents pushed into stretch commuting areas, often building depende...

Meet four members of the 2023-2024 Special Program for Urban and Regional Studies (SPURS) cohort: Carina Arvizu Machado, Lawrence Siddhartha Benninger, Salvador Herrera, and Tenzin Jamtsho.

Arvizu, an architect, urban planner and urban policy specialist, coordinated and designed public policies and projects regarding urban development, housing, mobility and road safety at the local, subnational and national level. A recipient of the Hubert H. Humphrey Fellowship, at MIT she is “excited to explore tools to reduce urban inequality, considering social, climate and environmental justice; deepen solutions regarding the intersections of mobility, urban development and gender; and explore ways in which cities can welcome and respond to the needs of migrants and displaced communities.”

Benninger, the founder of the Quantified Cities Movement (QCM), seeks to create more equitable and accessible urban environments through the crowdsourcing of citizen reporting and networking between citizens and lawmakers. “Being at MIT gives me the opportunity to interact with brilliant minds from all over the world! Being part of teams that are working at the cutting edge of urban and regional planning and sustainability is a real privilege,” said Benninger. “I am really excited to work with the Department of Urban Studies and Planning as well as MIT D-Lab, the MIT Policy Lab and the MIT Media Lab.”

Herrera, an urban and mobility planner with work experience in the US and Spain, focuses on sustainable mobility and transport-oriented development. During his time as a SPURS fellow, Herrera is interested in “exploring, enhancing and refining his negotiation skills with a social, environmental, and economical perspective and blend them with new techniques like AI, while also connecting with groups and initiatives related to urban and mobility planning, indigenous planning, housing and negotiation.”

Jamtsho is a civil servant for the Royal Government of Bhutan, leveraging his training as an engineer to address Bhutanese citizens’ water, sanitation, infrastructure, and development needs. “Being here at MIT gives me an extraordinary opportunity, one that I greatly appreciate,” said Jamtsho, who received the Hubert H. Humphrey Fellowship to spend a year at MIT. “My primary focus is to engage with and learn from the remarkable individuals who are on this campus with their expertise and insights. Additionally, I am eager to use this period to introspect and evaluate my career journey up to this point. I am equally excited to explore the numerous possibilities that lie ahead, considering new avenues and challenges that could shape the next phase of my professional journey.”

SPURS is a one-year non-degree program for mid-career individuals to enhance and reflect on their professional practice in planning and international development. SPURS is a host of the Hubert H. Humphrey Fellowship, a Fulbright exchange program. The 2023-2024 cohort – including Arvizu, Benninger, Herrera, and Jamtsho – is comprised of sixteen members from thirteen countries across the globe.

Learn more about the program: https://dusp.mit.edu/visiting-fellows -program-for-urban-and-regional-studies

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'In a time of multiple crises, we join broader calls insisting that a more just future is possible. To collectively realize more just Indigenous futures, we emphasize that urban planners (particularly non-Indigenous planners) must center Indigenous stewardship at every step, and must cultivate an openness to learning from Indigenous wisdoms in all forms,' said Kevin Lujan Lee (Chamoru) and Daniel Engelberg, reflecting upon their stewardship as editors of the most recent volume of Projections (MIT Press). 'This volume of Projections is a guide for planning to learn from Indigenous scholars, community leaders, elders, and artists, to more meaningfully support ongoing Indigenous sovereignty movements. For us, it has been an inspiring experience to bring into conversation these diverse thinkers, who do not always sit at the same tables, or share space in the same publications. We are particularly grateful to yəhaw̓ Indigenous Creatives Collective for graciously leading the process of engaging Indigenous artists, and for ensuring that their contributions were taken seriously as intellectual contributions in their own right.'

Learn more and access the full volume via coverage on the website: https://bit.ly/leeEngelbergPjif

Image credits: 1) Legacy by Epiphany Couch, photo by Mario Gallucci 2) Kevin Lujan Lee 3) Daniel Engelberg 4) Mele O Nā Kaukani Wai (Song of a Thousand Waters) by Lehuauakea (Kanaka maoli).

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As a human interacting with the built environment, what contributes to a vibrant and pleasurable urban experience? How has the movement to center human-scale design evolved in practice and theory?

A symposium hosted by MIT's City Form Lab brought together a global community of practitioners and scholars to engage a broad range of topics that extended from theoretical concepts in architecture and urban design to pragmatic challenges like the impacts of the climate crisis and disruptions generated by technological innovations.

Learn more via coverage on the website: https://bit.ly/cflRezDeVille

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Biodiversity is declining worldwide, driven foremost by the intensification in land management and the transformation of natural areas for agriculture, industrial-scale forestry production, and human settlements. Urban areas have doubled since 1992 and, in comparison with 2020, are projected to expand between 30% and 180% until 2100. How can communities best navigate the tension between the need for urban growth and the urgency of biodiversity conservation?

A practicum centered on Leticia, Colombia explored how local community groups with local academic and government actors could design and implement bioeconomic strategies with restoration efforts and urban redevelopment plans.

The practicum was led by 's Gabriella Carolini, MIT Environmental Solutions Initiative's John Fernandez, Marcela Angel (MCP '18), and Norhan Bayomi (PhD '22, Sm '17), and Alessandra Fabbri.

Read coverage, learn more about student and alumnae/i participants, and access final reports in Spanish and English via Marco Herndon's ESI story: https://bit.ly/angelBiodiversity

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Worried about hackers and their potential threat to your public agency? Assess your cyberattack vulnerabilities with "Cybersecurity for Critical Urban Infrastructure" from MIT DUSP. Open now, self-paced.

Learn more and enroll at https://bit.ly/3Limh9S

During a briefing at the Massachusetts State House last week, researchers from Wentworth Institute of Technology Construction Management program and MIT Center for Real Estate emphasized the importance of adopting the opt-in specialized code to help achieve and avoid the higher cost of future electrification retrofits.

The research team presented their study on net-zero building codes and housing affordability to Massachusetts policymakers. The authors stressed the urgency of the climate crisis and the need for more energy-efficient buildings in congruence with housing affordability and offered pathways to accomplishing both.

Read more: https://lnkd.in/gmRtFY5E

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Hbrama Hbrama

Despite the prevalence of concern and discussion about by , our metrics used to measure and understand the capital reinvestment, landscape change, and displacement of low-income groups are varied and often already outdated by the time we conceptualize a model. Could a new, systematic approach to measuring gentrification help us understand the causes and consequences to help mitigate or reduce negative externalities?

's devin michelle bunten and Benjamin Preis with Stanford University's Shifrah Aron-Dine propose a new classification of metrics and utilize four case studies to demonstrate the accuracy and efficacy of their approach.

Learn more via coverage on the DUSP website: https://bit.ly/buntenReGentrification

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Urban grids, the orientation of urban form along intersecting city blocks at right angles, are common throughout the Americas for structuring urban environments. How do changes in how we use and interact with the spaces defined by urban grids cause them to adapt from their original designs and morph over time?

A new paper by 's Brent D Ryan and Elaine Wang leverages Philadelphia, PA as a case study for how urban grids change from their original plans to adapt to new constraints and opportunities within a city.

Learn more and access the full paper: https://bit.ly/ryanWangUrbanGrids

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Opinion | 26 Empire State Buildings Could Fit Into New York’s Empty Office Space. That’s a Sign. As urban offices continue to empty out, great cities must embrace a shift from vocation to recreation.

Please join us in congratulating 's Wonyoung So, named a member of the 2023 Mozilla Technology Fund (MTF) cohort!

The MTF is used to support promising projects that seek to increase transparency and mitigate the bias of AI systems. Selected projects aim to realize impact within a year. The 2023 cohort is the second MTF cohort with eight open-source projects.

So's 'Countering Tenant Screening Using Tenant Screening Data,' seeks to develop a crowdsourcing tool and/or campaign to audit tenant screening services used by property owners. The project aims to reveal the patterns of the inner algorithms, data structures, and representations, by collecting tenant screening reports as well as denied renters’ experiences.

So is a PhD candidate whose research centers on how urban data and technology have historically been used to orchestrate, predict, and police public life and how the future of urban science can be different if we care more about empowering marginalized groups in the city.

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Local histories of race and space, often associated histories of white supremacy and exclusionary land-use practices, offer a point of origin for planners seeking to explore anti-racist future land use regulations. But how does one transition from analyzing historical evidence of legal and social constructs meant to discriminate to enabling and supporting thriving Black communities and spaces?

's Darien Alexander Williams and Justin Steil with DUSP alumnae Laura Humm Delgado (MCP ‘10, PhD ‘20) and Nicholette Cameron (MCP ‘22) explore in a new article in the Journal of the American Planning Association.

Learn more and access the full article: https://bit.ly/williamsAntiRacistFutures

Image credit: Illustrations for Soul City North Carolina in the 1970s

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JUST IN: Today, Health Affairs published two new Health Policy Briefs focused on how residential segregation affects health and relevant policy interventions to address.

In one brief, Justin Steil and Mariana Arcaya from MIT DUSP describe how residential segregation is a fundamental, structural determinant of health. They outline how it mediates exposure to key social determinants of health, including education, income, employment, and housing. “The evidence is particularly consistent in showing adverse maternal health and birth outcomes and obesity-related outcomes associated with segregation,” the authors report. “Segregation is also associated with health disparities between Black and White populations.”

Read the full brief here: https://bit.ly/3NfcAuy

Mel King, my friend, my teacher, my collaborator By Marie Kennedy My practice as a teacher and practitioner of what I term transformative community planning owes a great deal to Mel King, Paolo Freire, and Myles Horton. Of these three, Mel is the most important since I was privileged to work directly with him and in coalitions which he led, to enj...