News

The MIT Norman B. Leventhal Center for Advanced Urbanism is pleased to announce that it will be supporting the Urban Design Studio: Reclaiming Europe’s Coal Towns: Housing, Landscape, and Infrastructure in the Silesia Region, Poland. The studio will be co-taught by Rafi Segal and Marie Law Adams, who will bring together architecture, urbanism and planning students to work together.

David Vega-Barachowitz, Fadi Masoud, and Roi Salgueiro discuss the impact of land use regulation on the North American landscape. Coding the Third Condition, seeks to challenge and reimagine the Euclidean zoning system as an instrument capable of guiding contemporary urbanism. The design proposition searches for novel land use standards that arise from dynamic, ecological paradigms within the urban conditions.

The Center will be offering two workshops during IAP (January, 2017): a workshop on simulating neighborhood sustainability, and a hands-on lab-based workshop on designing urban wetlands.

11.S951: Using digital simulation mechanics to design sustainable neighborhood typologies
Instructors: Mary Anne Ocampo, David Birge, Sneha Mandhan

Ongoing research and design work generated through the Terra Sorta Firma - Coding Resilient Urbanism in South Florida urban design studio has been gaining momentum and traction at a regional level in Florida.

In late August, Andres Achury and Francis Goyes, Master in City Planning candidates and research assistants at the MIT Norman B. Leventhal Center for Advanced Urbanism, visited Colombia to carry out preliminary field research with Fundación Mario Santo Domingo (FMSD), one of the largest foundation in Colombia.

During the summer Prof. Wescoat took up the mantle of Co-Director from Prof. Santos, and will join Prof. Berger who has been appointed the Norman B. and Muriel Leventhal Professor of Advanced Urbanism. Professor Adèle Santos will join the growing body of affiliated faculty and will be spear heading the next biennial theme.

In early May, 2016, a research team from the MIT Norman B. Leventhal Center for Advanced Urbanism, visited Abu Dhabi to explore local neighborhoods and interact with stakeholders responsible for planning, design and allocation of Emirati housing in the city. The team, consisting of Research Associates David Birge and Sneha Mandhan, is part of a two year collaboration between MIT, led by Prof. Alan Berger, and Masdar Institute of Science and Technology, led by Prof. Khaled Alawadi, aiming to design sustainable neighborhood typologies for native housing in Abu Dhabi.

Recordings of the Future of Suburbia conference are now available. Future of Suburbia - Robert Bruegmann in conversation with Joel Budd. Heterogeneous - with Jed Kolko, David Rudlin (URBED), Ali Modarres (University of Washington). Moderated by Joel Kotkin (Chapman University). Productive - with Prof. Joan Nassauer (University of Michigan), Prof. Susannah Hagan (University of Westminster), Mitchell Joachim (Terreform One).

CAU’s wetlands project was part of the MIT Open House on April 23, 2016. In the Nepf Fluid Dynamics Lab, we set up four experimental wetland basins for visitors to see for themselves how design can impact water quality. In this activity, visitors inserted obstacles into the wetland basin in novel configurations to lengthen the amount of time a wooden bead took to travel through the wetland. We were visited by a wide spectrum of the local community- including families, young professionals, and MIT faculty and alums- and enjoyed receiving a high level of engagement by the public. 

As part of UN World Water Day, MIT CAU’s project on stormwater constructed wetlands was featured in the White House Water Summit’s Fact Sheet, which profiles important commitments made by stakeholders around the country to push forward water security. CAU’s project is undertaken by an interdisciplinary design and engineering team investigating how constructed wetlands for stormwater can combine performance and urban design functionality to become resiliency infrastructure for cities.

Boston Globe interview with the Future of Suburbia Exhibition team encourages a disciplinary shift to focus attention on suburbia. The exhibition projects a suburban future that works metabolically as a holistic system that actively provides resources like energy and waste disposal, supporting itself as well as city cores. 

On Monday 25-Jan, The Future of Suburbia exhibition opened, a multimedia synthesis of multiple years of research that has involved students, faculty, and practitioners.

Major goals of the work are to expose the nuance and complexity of the suburban condition, visually document suburbanization around the world, and produce four design frameworks for future suburban conditions. The four frameworks describe a future of suburbia that is heterogeneous, experimental, autonomous, and productive.

Infrastructural Monument details the first of two conferences organized by the MIT Center for Advanced Urbanism centered around the biennial theme of infrastructure.

Francis and Ricardo joined MIT’s Center for Advanced Urbanism (CAU) as research assistants at the beginning of Fall 2015. Prior to MIT, Francis worked as an architect at the intersection of design and social justice dealing with issues of affordability, equity, and sustainable development. Ricardo joined MIT with a background in architecture and civil engineering; having worked as the lead researcher developing projects for marginalized communities in Mexico.

Landfill has been an important way in growing Chinese coastal cities to create land and accommodate the increasing housing demand. Such developments are often heavily subsidized by the central and local government. However, we believe such model of urban growth can be devastating, especially to the ecosystems and the environment. Hoping to explore robust environmental strategies in China’s urban development, our “Littoral Gradient” team is investigating real estate development projects built on reclaimed land along Chinese coast.

In November 2015, Professors Alan Berger and Heidi Nepf, along with Lead Researcher Celina Balderas Guzman, traveled to Los Angeles to meet with stormwater city and county officials, ecological conservation leaders, and academics. They toured a couple of wetland projects in LA, including the Ballona Wetland and Oxford Basin project, learning about the complex political and ecological challenges facing projects of this kind in LA and the opportunities for intervention. Next spring, the team intends to travel to Houston, our other case study site, for comparative analysis.

Please join us on Monday November 2, 2015 for this special CAU event on “The Megacity Initiative: Exploring Urbanism though New Media” with CAU Visiting Scholars Matthew Niederhauser and John Fitzgerald. This talk will take place 12:30-1:30pm at the CAU (E14-140), lunch will be served. For more details contact cau@mit.edu.

As part of HUBweek  Harvard's Center for the Environment hosted Coping with Climate Change: How Will Boston Adapt?  As part of the panel discussion Professor Alan Berger spoke to the role of resilient districting in Boston as an approach to tackling urban coastal flooding issues.

As part of the CAU’s research on Climate + Urbanism, the Center recently undertook an internal design exercise to analyze the threat posed by climate change on Greater Boston. It focused on the applicability of “resiliency districting” as a means of protecting critical infrastructure, reinforcing regional infrastructure and soft systems, and transferring density out of vulnerable areas. This proposal also sought to demonstrate how new values can emerge in floodable areas by creating flux-receptive programs and land uses. 

This project initiates a new research direction of mutual interest to the mobility industry and urban designers/planners—the effects of automated driving on urban areas. Most current media and research interest in the automated sector focuses on dense urban environments, however, ongoing research the Center for Advanced Urbanism (CAU) documents how the suburban environment is the dominant form of urbanization in the U.S. (50%+ of the population, 55% of commute destinations). It is likely to remain dominant given the majority share of population and employment in suburban areas.

Philips has announced an alliance with MIT, for an initial term of five years and $25 million, that will ultimately support MIT research in the company’s core areas of health care and lighting solutions technology, which will be conducted in collaboration with Philips Research.

The new MIT-Philips alliance was formalized today with a signing ceremony attended by Global Head Henk van Houten of Philips Research, and MIT Provost Martin Schmidt and Associate Provost Karen Gleason. Some of the MIT researchers whose work will be supported by the new alliance also attended the signing.

Over the course of the spring semester students have been experimenting with emerging trends in the fields of landscape architecture and urbanism as they relate to the Center’s biennial theme, The Future of Suburbia. Centered around five design briefs (see below), the workshop has culminated in the design of suburban prototypes that respond to the various future challenges and opportunities that suburbia faces. The students work will form the foundations of an exhibition around the same theme, scheduled to open in early 2016. 

The overall goal of the Medellin Studio was to take the Manatiales de Paz neighborhood as a case study for research and action, in order to discover firsthand the process and form of fast informal urbanization as well as its consequences. Learning from the successful social agenda and the Proyectos Urbanos Integrados PUI (integrated urban projects) that regenerated the informal fabrics of Medellin, the studio aimed to  answer the following question: What if those infrastructural interventions could arrive in time? How should they be deployed? What would be the strategy for implementation?

The Illinois Institute of Technology (IIT) College of Architecture invited Fadi Masoud Lecturer of Landscape Architecture and Urban Design and Research Associate at the CAU to participate in an exhibition titled Emerging Landscapes. The exhibition is IIT College of Architecture’s primary curatorial effort this spring, and is a collaboration between Dean Wiel Arets and the MLA program faculty and students. The selected work on display is recognized as being the most influential in defining emerging trends in landscape architectural research, design, and practice.  

On March 26, 2015, the US Census released new data that researchers have been analyzing to find comparisons between urban core and suburban growth. Analysis from William Frey of the Brookings Institute shows that suburban areas are growing faster than urban cores.

Over IAP 2015, 10 students (MCP, M.Arch, SMarchS) spent seven days in Medellin on an initial workshop, visiting the urban projects in informal settlements and meeting with community partners in the city, including: peers at the Universidad Nacional de Colombia in Medellin, the municipality of Bello, the Manantiales de Paz board, as well as a host of city making professionals including: Alejandro Echeverri, Felipe Uribe, Camilo Restrepo and Carlos Escobar.

The MIT Center for Advanced Urbanism (CAU) was represented at this year’s World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland. Faculty Members – Professor John Lienhard, Professor Colette Heald, and Associate Provost Karen Gleason – and CAU Co-Director Alan Berger served on MIT’s IdeasLab panel on global food and water security, a topic central to the CAU’s ‘Environment + Urbanism’ research area.

Organized by the MIT Club of Delhi, Celina Balderas Guzman gave a talk on CAU’s research philosophy and mission as evidenced by CAU’s projects. The talk was prefaced by Mr. Shankar Aggarwal, Secretary of the Ministry of Urban Development of India, who spoke about India’s urban challenges. The talk was generously hosted by Mr. Vinay Rai, MIT alum and leader of the Rai Foundation.

Image credit: Matthew Niederhauser and John Fitzgerald. 

The U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) Secretary Shaun Donovan has announced that six design proposals -- including one by MIT's Center for Advanced Urbanism, with partners ZUS + Urbanisten -- have been selected as winners of HUD’s Rebuild by Design competition. The MIT team’s winning design proposal "New Meadowlands” protects a unique area of approximately thirty square miles in the NY/NJ Metropolitan Region, against future flood events.

“To resolve the world’s ecological problems, we first have to work on the problems facing our cities.” This observation by landscape architect Dirk Sijmons is the premise of the sixth edition of the International Architecture Biennale Rotterdam: IABR–2014–URBAN BY NATURE– and it earned him the curatorship of this edition. A major exhibition, URBAN BY NATURE– will guide visitors through the contemporary urban landscape to experience the metabolism of the city. For the first time in its history, the now sustainable Kunsthal will be used in its entirety for a single exhibition.

The Center for Advanced Urbanism participated in the 2013 Bi-City Biennale of Urbanism/Architecture, in Shenzhen. The CAU's exhibit entitled "Infrastructural Objects as Enablers of Cultural Change", presented a hypothesis in regards to the diffusion of industrial structures into society at large. Through a process of embedding and re-appropriating, buildings instill new values, forms and symbols into an otherwise conformist urban order.

An international design team consisting of the MIT Center for Advanced Urbanism (US) and Dutch Delta Collective (NL) was charged by Shaun Donovan, United States Secretary of Housing and Urban Development, with a study and design for the reconstruction and redevelopment of the northeast coastline of the United States, after the passage of hurricane Sandy in 2012. The team combines the cutting edge research and local knowledge of MIT and the best in water design and management from the Netherlands, such as De Urbanisten, Deltares, Volker Infra Design, ZUS and 75B.