DUSP Domestic Projects 2017

DEPARTMENT OF URBAN STUDIES AND PLANNING

Massachusetts Institute of Technology 77 Massachusetts Avenue, Bldg. 7-337 Cambridge, Massachusetts 02139 dusp.mit.edu

DOMESTIC PROJECTS > ECONOMIC

DEVELOPMENT, HOUSING, AND DESIGN

> ENERGY,

SUSTAINABILITY, AND ADAPTATION

> HEALTH

AND THE BUILT ENVIRONMENT

> NETWORKED > URBAN

CITIES AND MOBILITY

RETROFITTING AND NEIGHBORHOOD PLANNING

DOMESTIC PROJECTS

>> ECONOMIC DEVELOPMENT, HOUSING, AND

DESIGN Civic Design Network Civic Engagement and Public Participation are central tools for planners. The Civic Design Network is comprised of planners, activists, organizers, artists, and others dedicated to broaden the array of tools and knowledge available to strengthen the public’s voice and power in democracy.

Place: Dudley Street Neighborhood in Roxbury, MA Faculty: Ceasar McDowell Immigration and Hispanic Growth in the US Analyzing the association between Spanish toponymy and Hispanic demographics in order to understand the historical resilience of culturally-driven demographic settlement patterns.

Place: Various Faculty: Albert Saiz Investigating the Urban Environment to Support Mathematics Learning The development of high school curricular modules to investigate social justice themes related to the local, urban context. The modules are enhanced by the integration of geo-spatial technologies that enable students to explore their local urban landscape, collect field data, and organize and visualize patterns.

Place: New York City, NY Faculty: Sarah Williams Partners: CUNY’s Brooklyn College MA Life Sciences Biocluster: The Next Chapter Working with state representatives and medical researchers we are building a community-based analytical framework to assess opportunities to deploy life sciences-related in rebuilding Massachusetts Gateway City economies.

Places: Worcester and Brockton, MA Faculty: Amy Glasmeier and Teresa Lynch Partners: MIT Center for Biomedical Innovation; Mass Development and their Gateway Cities program; Mass Life Sciences Center.

Revitalizing Urban Main Streets Supporting vitality and improvement of neighborhood commercial districts through preparation of commercial district plans.

Place: Boston, MA Faculty: Karl Seidman Partners: Boston Main Streets Program; Allston Village Main Streets.

Strategies for Community-Led Regeneration Community engagement and development strategies for the Emancipation Park neighborhood, a historically African-American community.

Place: Houston, TX Faculty: Mary Anne Ocampo Partners: Emancipation Economic Development Council Working Cities Challenge Evaluation initiative to advance collaborative leadership and improve the lives of low-income people in Massachusetts smaller cities.

Place: MA Faculty: Karl Seidman Partner: Federal Reserve Bank of Boston >> ENERGY, SUSTAINABILITY, AND ADAPTATION

Enabling Citizens and Owners to Invest in Green Infrastructure This project studies the existing obstacles to investment in green infrastructure, and seeks to build new tools, policies, and processes in order to enable actors at all levels, including citizens, neighborhoods, institutions, and city agencies to realize the city’s ambitious environmental goals.

Place: Philadelphia, PA Faculty: David Hsu Partner: USEPA Fostering Sustainable Consumption in U.S. Cities Generates high-quality information about what works and why in urban sustainability programs; creates a protocol for conducting systematic assessments of urban sustainability programs.

Places: U.S. Cities Faculty: Eran Ben-Joseph Off-Shore Wind Energy: The Status of State and Federal Efforts Assess state and federal efforts to promote and regulate off-shore wind energy projects. Analyze the cost and environmental implications of new technology (e.g., floating wind turbines), multi-state cooperation, federal licensing procedures and state spatial planning efforts.

Places: East Coast of the United States Faculty: Larry Susskind Partner: National Science Foundation Relocation and Sea Level Rise In Metropolitan Boston This project speculates potential scenarios for longterm climate change displacement and maps strategic principles and procedures that could be adopted as part of a regional relocation strategy for climate change refugees.

Place: Boston, MA Faculty: Brent Ryan, Christopher Zegras

DEPARTMENT OF URBAN STUDIES AND PLANNING Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Resilient Urbanism in South Florida Florida has $101 billion worth of property projected to be below sea level by 2030. In this project student teams devised a set of unique resiliency zoning, codes, land uses, programs, and typologies that are precise, yet dynamic, flexible, and responsive.

Place: Broward County Florida Faculty: Miho Mazereeuw, Fadi Masoud Partners: Broward County Strategies for Urban Stormwater Wetlands Designing urban constructed wetlands as multifunctional sustainability features for cities to improve ecosystem services, re-use water, and create amenities.

Place: Los Angeles, CA; Houston, TX Faculty: Alan Berger, Heidi Nepf >> HEALTH AND THE BUILT ENVIRONMENT

Building Power and Healthy Buildings Upgrading faith-based institutions and multifamily buildings in the Bronx to save community members money on their utility bills, lower greenhouse gas emissions, improve respiratory health, and create green local jobs.

Place: Bronx, NY Faculty: Phil Thompson, Mariana Arcaya Partners: CoLab; Bronx Cooperative Development Initiative Public Health Impacts of Climate Change and Adaptation Planning Using role-play simulations and on-line computer games that stress the public health impacts of climate change to examine the extent to which various segments of the population in Cambridge, MA and Boston, MA are ready to participate in adaptation planning efforts. Also, exploring the extent to which the results of Vulnerability and Resilience Assessments are being incorporated into updated master plans.

Place: Cambridge and Boston, MA Faculty: Larry Susskind Partners: MIT Science Impact Collaborative; Cambridge Department of City Development Resilience in Survivors of Katrina The project aims to understand the mechanisms by which disasters affect the mental and physical health of vulnerable populations over the long-term. Analyses are designed to investigate how individual- and communitylevel factors shape recovery trajectories.

Places: Various Faculty: Mariana Arcaya

Social Impact Investing for Health This project investigates the effects of transit-oriented development investment on neighborhoods and their residents. Using a “Quadruple Bottom Line� approach to selecting projects that includes a consideration of community, environmental, and health impacts in addition to financial returns.

Place: MA Faculty: Mariana Arcaya Partners: Conservation Law Foundation; Massachusetts Department of Public Health; Harvard Center for Population and Development Studies; Urban Imprint; Metropolitan Area Planning Council >> NETWORKED CITIES AND MOBILITY

Bus Rapid Transit Corridor Design Examine the relationship between the design of bus rapid transit systems and the planning and design of urban environments in Boston and Mexico City.

Place: Boston, MA Faculty: Chris Zegras Partner: MBTA Crowd Sourced City Workshop To investigate the use of social media and digital technologies for planning and advocacy by working with planning and advocacy organizations to develop, implement, and evaluate prototype digital tools.

Places: Boston, MA, and New York City, NY Faculty: Sarah Williams Partners: Center for Urban Pedagogy; Community Labor United; The Cypress Hills Local Development Corporation; Made in the Lower East Side, miLES Cybersecurity for Critical Urban Infrastructure Using simulated cyberattacks, assess the ways that cybersecurity experts and senior managers of utilities and urban infrastructure systems respond to ransomware. Evaluate the extent to which negotiations with cyberterrorists are possible.

Place: New England Faculty: Larry Susskind, Stuart Madnick, Partners: Internet Policy Research Initiative @ MIT; CSAIL at MIT; Sloan School of Management; MIT Science Impact Collaborative Emotional Travel: Pride, Dependence, and Social Bias This project examines human emotions that are associated with travel behavior, including car pride, car dependence, implicit social bias in mode choice, and emotional responses to waiting.

Places: Various Faculty: Jinhua Zhao

DOMESTIC PROJECTS

Healthy Aging, Travel Behavior, and Neighborhoods To understand the relationship between residential settings (urban, suburban, age-restricted) and active travel choices among older adults.

Place: Boston, MA Faculty: Eran Ben-Joseph, Chris Zegras Partner: US DOT

Resilient Cities Housing Initiative Assesses global efforts to produce affordable housing in ways that also contribute to economic livelihood, environmental well-being, personal security and community self-governance.

Places: Various Faculty: Larry Vale

Innovative Products, Spaces, and Technology This project is about mapping the foundation of innovation to the built environment. The path of innovation is important for understanding the adoption of new technologies and teh system that has developed to bring new products and processes to the market efficiently.

Places: Various Faculty: Dennis Frenchman, David Geltner, and Andrea Chegut

Shrinking Cities Shrinking Cities research and studios explore the challenges of rebuilding once-thriving industrial cities characterized by abandonment, contamination, and decline.

Places: Various Faculty: Brent Ryan

Lighting, Value, and Land Use Across the 50 Largest U.S. Metro Areas Development of a metropolitan scale lighting index of the country’s fifty largest metro areas to investigate possible linkages between lighting and economic vitality.

Faculty: Alan Berger, Carlo Ratti, Sarah Williams Partner: Philips The Rise of the Platform or ‘Sharing’ Economy in Urban Spaces This project looks at the political economy of ‘disruptive’ market transformation within the rise of the platform or ‘sharing’ economy. It assesses the role of social and plitical institutions in shaping market outcomes across diverse international contects.

Places: Various Faculty: Jason Jackson >> URBAN RETROFITTING AND NEIGHBORHOOD

PLANNING Land Use & Community Planning Students prepared plans for the city’s Winter Hill/ Magoun Square area, a designated gateway for Union Square, and the Brickbottom/McGrath neighborhood, and (forthcoming) Ball Square and new Green Line transit stations.

Place: Somerville, MA Faculty: Terry Szold and Viktorija Abolina Partner: City of Somerville Planning Division Networks in Community-Based Planning Examines the extent to which New York State’s Brownfield Opportunity Area (BOA) program reconfigured the organizational networks of community-based environmental justice organizations and community development corporations that received BOA grants.

Place: New York Faculty: Justin Steil

Judicial Conceptions of Social Rights and Property Rights Analyzes the judicial decisions to understand how courts’ diverging conceptions of urban space and of property rights shaped their decision making. It also looks at historical census and other data to explore how changing urban demographics related to ordinance passage and how the ordinances shaped the creation of local NAACP chapters and acts of racially motivated violence.

Place: Various Faculty: Justin Steil Water Affordability in Shrinking Cities in America This project examine ways in which infrastructure finance contributes to water cutoffs and other waterrelated difficulties facing residents in poverty. Review the rights of poor residents with regard to access to clean water at a cost they can afford.

Places: Baltimore, Detroit, Philadelphia Faculty: Larry Susskind and Gabriella Carolini Partners: MIT Science Impact Collaborative; MIT Environmental Solutions Initiative West Philadelphia Landscape Project Founded in 1987, the West Philadelphia Landscape Project is an action research program that links community development and environmental restoration.

Among the key discoveries of the project is the high correlation between buried floodplains and vacant land in inner city neighborhoods.

Place: Philadelphia, PA Faculty: Anne Whiston Spirn Partners: Philadelphia Water Department; CoLab; Aspen Farms Community Garden