The Future Is Cities

Cities are growing faster than you can say megalopolis, and thanks to social media and the Internet, global climate change and a bad economy, the American dream of ownership is changing, and we are finding ourselves living in inclusive cities, sharing our houses, cars, bikes, offices, and more.

Shaping Vibrant Cities

Alumni from Toronto to Beijing meet to discuss urbanism.

Urban Physics

Franz-Josef Ulm’s serendipitous observation leads to research linking physics and urban planning.

Smart Components, Assembling Themselves

Skylar Tibbits transforms common materials into responsive and reconfigurable building elements.

Where Economy Meets Ecology

John Fernández is at the forefront of urban sustainability, an emerging field that explores a city’s economy and ecology.

Barriers to Opportunity

Xavier de Souza Briggs reveals that if people in high-poverty areas move to low-poverty areas, soon they may be no better off than before.

Resilient Places

San Francisco rebuilt after the 1906 earthquake while Warsaw rebuilt after World War 11. Larry Vale explains what makes cities so resilient.

Seductive Spaces, Sustainable Energy

Christoph Reinhart, who runs MIT’s Sustainable Design Lab, creates a new modeling system to evaluate hundreds of buildings at a time.

A Soft House, To Last a Century

Sheila Kennedy creates a Soft House –– tough enough to withstand the harshest elements and to last a century.

Almost Middle Class

Christine Walley is on a quest to share the devastating effects of deindustrialization in American cities.

3-D Printed Buildings for A Developing World

Larry Sass’s vision is for new buildings to rise faster, use fewer resources, and cost less, thanks to digital fabrication.

Do-it-Yourself Manufacturing

Neil Gershenfeld creates fab labs, aimed to reshape cities socially and economically.

Data Visualizing Healthy Cities

Sep Kamvar’s group is making 10,000 data visualization maps, so residents can view cities like never before.

Greening Gray Infrastructure

Judith Layzer says as urban development escalates and climate change creates rising seas, current water management systems are failing.

From Pollutants to Smart Policy

Noelle Eckley Selin’s work to cut urban air pollution attracts attention of environmental policy makers across the world.

Not Just Men in Spandex

Michael Lin and Sandra Richter design a future vehicle for bike lanes.