News

The 2020 LCAU Seed Grant has been awarded to three interdisciplinary teams from the School of Architecture and Planning for their research tackling issues of equity and resilience in urban planning and design. The teams will be exploring cultural resilience in the Zaatari refugee camp in Jordan, cooperative land ownership in manufactured housing communities in the U.S., and the communication of climate change within the space of the city through a ceremonial urban performance in East Boston.

More details on the projects may be found at the links below:

In early October, Design with Nature Now was released to mark the 50th anniversary of McHarg’s Design with Nature. It features contributions from several affiliated faculty including Anne Spirn on A Landscape of Ideas and Actions, and commentary from Alan Berger and Jonah Susskind on The Planetary Optic and Finding the Real Ground.

Read The Dirt’s review here.

Professor Alan Berger, and researcher associates David Birge and Sneha Mandan from the Norman B. Leventhal Center for Advanced Urbanism have recently concluded a two-year research effort examining strategies for achieving zero-carbon suburban development in hyper-arid conditions. Their analysis explored technology adoption to create new energy-water regimes, the potential role of landscaping in carbon sequestration, and the coupling of environmental and socio-cultural sustainability for better design.

MIT’s Norman B. Leventhal Center for Advanced Urbanism (LCAU) is pleased to name Malden Works for Waterfront Equity and Resilience the winner of the 2019 Norman B. Leventhal City Prize, a $100,000 award to catalyze transformative urban design and planning approaches. Malden Works is a new, experimental resilience project in the City of Malden, Massachusetts.

One of the hallmarks of a research institute is the capacity to bring multiple disciplines to bear on societies most pressing challenges. Over the past two years, the Norman B Leventhal Center for Advanced Urbanism (LCAU) has increasingly used the Undergraduate Research Opportunity Program (UROP) to help foster collaborations between departments, and to develop new research and design techniques and methods.

Vibrant, innovative cities most often result from powerful collaborations among diverse constituencies.

To support this ideal, the MIT Norman B. Leventhal Center for Advanced Urbanism (LCAU) has announced the creation of a new interdisciplinary prize aimed at catalyzing innovative urban design and planning approaches worldwide, with a goal of improving the quality of life and environment for residents. 

Los Angeles has long captured the imaginations of designers and urbanists for its characteristic embodiment of the twentieth-century metropolis. The city’s vast polycentric agglomerations of diverse communities, single-purpose transportation, and utility infrastructure—framed against a backdrop of ocean, mountain, and desert landscapes—have inspired an impressive lineage of techno-futurist identities and visionary design engagement.

The MIT School of Architecture and Planning will offer a new concentration to support collaborative doctoral-level studies in Advanced Urbanism, with applications being accepted in fall 2018.

The results from a two-year collaboration with the Masdar Institute of Technology have been published in Building & Environment. The research explored viable paths to developing and/or transitioning to low-carbon suburbs in hot-arid regions. The work undertook a case-study of Emirati villas in Abu Dhabi; analyzing the combined impact of energy efficiency gains through technology adoption and improved design, carbon intensity reduction through renewable energy transitions, and carbon sequestration from parcel scale tree planting.

This academic year 2018-19, the Norman B. (1938) and Muriel Leventhal Graduate Fellowships have been awarded to Bella Purdy (MCP, DUSP) and Malcolm Rio (SMArchS Urbanism, ARCH). These fellowships recognize academic excellence in students who exhibit an interest in the research and design of large-scale metropolitan environments.

Join us on 25th April 2018 at 6:30PM in the Long Lounge (7-429) for It's Not Pretty - Informality Beyond Design

Presenters include: James Debowski, Nastya Pnomaryova, David Birge. Followed by a moderated discussion led by Brent Ryan and Rafi Segal.

This event is co-sponsored by the Norman B. Leventhal Center for Advanced Urbanism and the Joint Program in City Design and Development, DUSP.

In the fall of 2017, the MIT Norman B. Leventhal Center for Advanced Urbanism supported faculty and students from the MIT School of Architecture and Planning to develop a research and design studio focused on propositional design frameworks for adapting coastal urban morphologies to meet the challenges of sea-level rise in Boston. These proposals took on two typological sites, each of which embodied several of the complex issues related to social, economic, and environmental resilience at the scale of the district.

Water Management for Future Climate Scenarios,  January 31st, 3:30 - 5:00 PM, E51-095, MIT

Join J-WAFS for an IAP seminar featuring Tyler Swingle who will be discussing the strategies for urban stormwater wetlands in Houston and Los Angeles.

During January (IAP) three workshop kicked off further explorations of affordable housing internationally. Marie Law Adams and Adele Santos led a group of students from the departments of Architecture and Urban Studies and Planing to Georgetown, Guyana. With support from the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB) and in collaboration with the University of Guyana the workshop has explored aspects of public infrastructure flooding, and community development as they relate to housing in the neighborhood of Sophia.

What is the future of global suburbia? The Norman B. Leventhal Center for Advanced Urbanism at MIT (LCAU) has collaborated with a network of artists, researchers, theorists, faculty, and students to examine emergent trends of suburban design and development around the world. Infinite Suburbia (Princeton Architectural Press, Oct.

In addition to extending Grand Challenge research from 2016 and 2017 - for Professor Sam Madden and Professor Thomas Malone, Philips Lighting has initiated four new research projects this academic year.

What is the future of global suburbia? The Norman B. Leventhal Center for Advanced Urbanism at MIT (LCAU) has collaborated with a network of artists, researchers, theorists, faculty, and students to examine emergent trends of suburban design and development around the world. Infinite Suburbia (Princeton Architectural Press, Oct.

According to Prof. Berger millennials want a different kind of suburban development - one that is smart, efficient and sustainable. In a recent New York Times article, he explores a new model for a sustainable suburb of the future. Building off of the Norman B.

Professor Berger recently joined Hyperloop’s Vision for America Conference in Washington D.C. with other panelists including former Secretary of Transportation Anthony Foxx; KPMG Head of Infrastructure Andy Garbutt; Vice President of Corporate Communications and Government Affairs of Amtrak, Caroline Decker; and former BNSF Railway Vice President of Network Strategy Dean Wise.

Professor Meejin Yoon has been awarded the 2017 MIT Norman B. Leventhal Center for Advanced Urbanism Seed Grant to support her FloatLab project. Sited within the Schuylkill River in Philadelphia, FloatLab is an educational platform to study and observe the transforming urban waterway. Professor Yoon will lead an interdisciplinary team of researchers, engineers and environmental scientists to explore how cities like Philadelphia are revitalizing their river fronts and learning from urban river ecologies.

The MIT Norman B. Leventhal Center for Advanced Urbanism is very pleased to announce the recipients of the 2017 MIT-Philips Lighting Grand Challenge. This year’s Grand Challenge was focused on the future of Internet of Things in lighting and beyond. Teams from across MIT were invited to submit proposals that investigated a new approach or idea, conduct short-term, exploratory research and seed ideas for longer-term sponsored research.

MIT Better World features Water-Conserving Design: "For the past several years, James Wescoat, Aga Khan Professor of Islamic Architecture and co-director of the Norman B. Leventhal Center for Advanced Urbanism, has collaborated on this nexus of water, food, and energy with Afreen Siddiqi ’99, SM ’01, PhD ’06, a research scientist in MIT’s Institute for Data, Systems, and Society.

Developing the Littoral Gradient research team Fadi Masoud, Brent Ryan, and Colleen Xi Qiu (PhD Candidate) conducted a 4-city, 8-day field study and research trip to China funded by the Sam Tak Lee Faculty Research Seed Grant. While on the trip, the team met with key research affiliates, academics, planners, and developers in Beijing, Tianjin, Shenzhen, and Hong Kong.

Two conference papers have been accepted for ASCAAD in Nov. 2016. The papers were written by the MIT-Masdar team, who are looking at mapping Abu Dhabi’s native-born neighborhoods. The papers are entitled: Dynamic Simulation of Neighborhood Scale Water Use. A case study of Emirati neighborhoods in Abu Dhabi, UAE, and Dynamic Digital Simulation of External Visual Privacy in Arab Muslim Households. A case study of Emirati neighborhoods in Abu Dhabi, UAE.

Wetlands Design Testing from MIT Norman B. Leventhal Center for Advanced Urbanism: Researchers experiment with different geometries to maximize jet dispersion in stormwater wetlands that also provide urban amenity, ecological, and water quality functions. This research is funded by MIT Abdul Latif Jameel World Water and Food Security Lab (J-WAFS). Further information may be found here.

MIT has named its Center for Advanced Urbanism (CAU) in honor of Norman B. Leventhal '38, a visionary developer and philanthropist at the center of Boston’s postwar revival. A life member emeritus of the MIT Corporation who died last year, Mr. Leventhal was a vital member of the MIT community for three-quarters of a century.

The center was officially named the Norman B. Leventhal Center for Advanced Urbanism (LCAU) today at a signing ceremony attended by Alan and Sherry Leventhal and other members of Norman Leventhal’s extended family.  

Jonathan Mingle: On the global stage, cities may be where the spotlight often falls — but the suburbs are where the action is.

CAU research featured in current issue of Volume #47: The System.

Metabolic Wastebelts: Waste creates its own landscape, and thus our relation to it, like all landscapes, is ultimately a question of design. Unlike the pastoral, though, water landscapes need to overcome stigma and outright danger. The question again seems to be at least one addressable by means of design. MIT Center for Advanced Urbanism speculate about potential landscape strategies to harvest social and urban value from waste. 

Future of Suburbia Conference is introduced by Eric Bender in Moving Beyond Suburban Legends. The conference is designed to appeal broadly to professionals involved in urban planning and development, and will explore how suburbs and their metropolitan areas may be made more sustainable and livable through better design and planning. The gathering will build on a two-year research effort by CAU, which has sought to go beyond traditional analyses of urban landscapes, such as deb

Cities today are the cumulative product of codes and standards that have directed how people use, construct, and shape their environments. By extrapolating the legends of land use maps, this timeline seeks to expose how landmark codes and ordinances have shaped the North American landscape. The legend in isolation, free from its associations, reveal the the often reductive, scientific rationality of the code in contrast to the fluid networks of landscapes and communities. 

We are delighted to announce a new research collaboration as part of of the Masdar Institute and Massachusetts Institute of Technology Cooperative Program. Dr. Khaled Al Awadi and Prof. Alan Berger will lead research into Abu Dhabi Scenario Planning & Design of New Sustainable Neighborhood Forms. The project aims to develop sustainable neighborhood typologies by understanding the contextual form and analyzing the quantitative urban metabolic flows at a household and neighborhood level for native housing in Abu Dhabi.

The MIT Center for Advanced Urbanism is pleased to announce that it will be supporting the Urban Design Studios: Renacimiento: Reviving Mexico's Abandoned Towns, and Conservation and Re-use of Industrial Heritage at the Shanghai Minsheng Dock. The studios will be co-taught by Brent Ryan and Rafi Segal, and Dennis Frenchman and Jan Wampler respectively. Included below are some more details as to their studios.

As a research assistant at the Center for Advanced Urbanism, I have worked under Research Associate and Lecturer MIT Fadi Masoud on developing a new codification scheme for dynamic environmental processes. The project, which will be encapsulated in an exhibition slated for Spring 2016, is grounded in the notion that a third condition, process-based language of urbanism, can better accommodate and react to fluctuating conditions, from wet to dry, light to dark, and hot to cold.

The CAU Strategies for Urban Stormwater Wetlands is a research project that combines climatically engineered wetland solutions with key formal and functional landscape designs in urban planning. The project offers me an unique experience as an architecture student to work with fluid mechanics engineers and urban designers. The diverse team is working beyond ambiguous green space designs and towards an urban infrastructure composed of technically sound wetlands and aesthetically pleasing urban landscapes.

The MIT Center for Advanced Urbanism is very pleased to announce the MIT-Philips Lighting Grand Challenge on The Future of Lighting and Illumination in Smart Cities, Infrastructure, Public Spaces, Buildings, and Homes.

How can social housing in Mexico be better connected to economic opportunity? How can abandoned developments be revived? How can troves of untapped housing and development data be used to benefit Mexican citizens?

The World According to Architecture, a visualization of a research developed by Gabriel Kozlowski, Roi Salgueiro, and Hashim Sarkis, will be on view at Yale School of Architecture until Nov. 14. The visualization shows, conceptualizes and categorizes 25 architectural and urban projects that have considered the scale of the world as a design question. The work is included in the exhibition "City of 7 Billion: A Constructed World", curated by Joyce Hsiang and Bimal Mendis. A homonymous symposium will take place at Yale between Oct. 1 and 3. Dean Sarkis will give the closing address. 

A New Model for the Urban-Rural Fringe in Jiangsu Province (led by Prof. Adèle Santos), and Developing the Littoral Gradient (led by Prof. Brent Ryan and Fadi Masoud) have been awarded Sam Tak Lee Faculty Research Grants. A total of thirteen grants were awarded to faculty and researchers from across the Institute. Research will commence during the fall of 2015.

Strategies for Urban Stormwater Wetlands Los Angeles and Houston led by Professor Heidi Nepf, Professor Alan Berger and Lead Researcher Celina Balderas Guzman has been awarded an Abdul Latif Jameel World Water and Food Security Lab (J-WAFS) seed-grant. A total of nine grants of $200,000 for two years were awarded to researchers from 11 MIT departments. 

Professor James Wescoat and Fadi Masoud have two separate chapters published in a book titled “Out of Water: Design Solutions for Arid Regions” and just released by Birkhauser. Water-Conserving Design Solutions: Contributions of Water Budget Analysis in Arid and Semi-Arid Regions by Prof.

On a recent trip to Japan, Alan Berger Co-Director of the Center for Advanced Urbanism, lectured on The Inverted Tent: American Urbanization and Future Mobility.

MIT CAU visiting scholars Matthew Niederhauser and John Fitzgerald just returned from a trip to Johannesburg, South Africa and Maputo, Mozambique where they acquired material for the 2016 Future of Suburbia biennial exhibition and associated Infinite Suburbia publication. Johannesburg is a rapidly expanding city marked by stark divides. Its periphery is known for its highly fortified, insular suburban enclaves and large shopping malls that continue to be built at a rapid pace, especially around Pretoria.

Rising Tides: Planning and designing Boston’s land use and mobility system for a changing climate led by professors Christopher P. Zegras and Brent Ryan has been awarded an MIT Center for Advanced Urbanism Seed Grant. They will lead an interdisciplinary team of seven students to explore strategies for adapting to potential sea level rise (SLR) through simulated interventions in the land use-transportation system in the Boston Metropolitan Area (BMA).

Fostering Sustainable Consumption in U.S. Cities led by Professor Judith Layzer (PI) has been awarded an MIT Environmental Solutions Initiative (MIT-ESI) Environmental Research Seed Grants. A total of 59 teams of faculty, research staff, and students responded to the call for proposals, with Prof. Layzer one of nine winners. She will collaborate on this research with faculty including, environmental economist Dr. Frank Ackerman, scientific historian Professor Jennifer Light, and landscape architect and urban designer Professor Alan Berger, as well as Ph.D candidate Lily Pollans.

On 13-14th March, the CAU hosted a “think tank” design charrette on The Future of Suburbia – the Center’s biennial theme. The workshop marks the half-way point in the biennial theme, which will culminate in spring 2016 with a major conference, exhibition, and publication. A number of lectures, courses, design charrettes and other events are also being held through the spring of 2016 in support of the theme.

The Medellin Studio: Providing infrastructure for informal settlements in Bello, Colombia (Co-taught by Lorena Bello and Jota Samper)

The Center for Advanced Urbanism is pleased to announce the line up for its Lecture Series 2014-15. They will be held on Monday evenings in the Long Lounge (7-429). Further details are available here

The series will begin on 22th September with Louise Mozingo, Professor & Chair of the Department of Landscape Architecture and Environmental Planning, UC Berkeley discussing Pastoral Capitalism: Corporations, Suburbs, and the Metropolitan Landscape. 

Join the Center for Advanced Urbanism as they present at the 2014 MIT ILP Europe Conference in Brussels on May 21-22nd. Tickets available here

The Spring 2014 Scaling Infrastructure conference is CAU’s second and final infrastructure conference of our biennial theme that will convene political leaders, infrastructural engineers, design professionals and academicians to discuss groundbreaking ideas on infrastructure. Faced with new economic, political, and environmental challenges, the question of appropriate infrastructural investments and design scales is critical to the future of urbanized territories.

On October 28, the MIT CAU ZUS team revealed five Design Opportunities across the Hurricane Sandy-affected region. The CAU ZUS team presented each proposal which are all now available online. This juncture marks the end of Phase II that included three months of research and conversation with communities in New York, New Jersey, Connecticut, and beyond.