Cipher News editor Amy Harder spotlights the MIT Renewable Energy Clinic, a new course developed by Prof. Larry Susskind aimed at training students to be mediators in conflicts over clean energy projects. Harder notes that the course is focused on creating “collaboration that may slow down projects initially by incorporating more input but ultimately speed them up by avoiding later-stage conflicts.”
DUSP Lecturer Bruno Verdini PhD ’15 speaks with Jenn Williams of Foreign Policy’s “The Negotiators” podcast to discuss the 2012 Colorado River agreement between the United States and Mexico, and his book, “Winning Together: The Natural Resource Negotiation Playbook.” “If you are recognizing that the feedback loops in natural resource negotiations are going to be complex and unexpected as time goes by, you only have an ability to monitor, be flexible, and address new challenges if you’ve created a mechanism of trust, and in that mechanism implementation follows, even across different political perspectives,” says Verdini. “Because it is in your interest to keep complying.”
In an article for Bloomberg, Prof. Carlo Ratti and Michael Baick, a staff writer at CRA-Carlo Ratti Associati, highlight the importance of communication within cities. “The world has an incredible stockpile of effective urban policies, but the best ideas are not being adopted quickly or widely enough,” write Ratti and Baick. “Covid-19 taught us all how to slow the spread of viruses: wear masks, avoid large gatherings and take vaccines. To speed the spread of good ideas, we need to take the opposite tack by making urban solutions go viral.”
Prof. Emeritus Frank Levy and Louisiana State Prof. Scott Abrahams have published a working paper titled “The Revival of U.S. Populism: How 39 Years of Manufacturing Losses and Educational Gains Reshaped the Electoral Map,” reports Thomas B. Edsall for The New York Times. The paper makes “the case that polarization and institutional gridlock have roots dating back more than four decades,” explains Edsall.
Senior Lecturer and Senior Research Associate Fred Salvucci BS '61 SM '62 speaks with GBH’s The Big Dig Podcast host Ian Coss about his role in Boston’s “Big Dig” project. “The idea for the Big Dig began with an unlikely friendship,” explains Coss. “During the highway debates in the early 70s, Fred Salvucci – one of the highway opponents – went to a ton of meetings. And across the table at many of those meetings was a man named Bill Reynolds; he was there to represent the road builders.”
Professor Karilyn Crockett speaks with GBH’s The Big Dig Podcast host Ian Coss about the impact of The “Big Dig” – Boston’s highway project – on the city, its people and urban planning. Crockett “argues that despite all the incentives to build, build, build, the costs of that building would eventually force city residents to think the unthinkable,” says Coss. “So the anti-highway fight becomes a moment of imagining possibilities,” says Crockett.
Writing for The Boston Globe, MIT Prof. Carlo Ratti and Harvard Prof. Antoine Picon examine AI and the future of cities, noting that their research has shown “once trained, visual AI is shockingly accurate at predicting property values, crime rates, and even public health outcomes — just by analyzing photos.” They add: “Tireless, penetrating artificial eyes are coming to our streets, promising to show us things we have never seen before. They will be incredible tools to guide us — but only if we keep our own eyes open.”
MIT AgeLab Director Joseph Coughlin speaks with New York Times opinion columnist Farhad Manjoo about why the tech industry tends to ignore older people. “The market is aging,” says Coughlin. “The market is numerous. The market has got more money than the people they have been building products for.”
Prof. Carlo Ratti co-authors an article for The Boston Globe that examines the “power and pitfalls of condensing cities into small, specialized utopias,” like Barbie Land and Los Alamos. “To see diversity at work, we need look no further than Barbenheimer itself,” they write. “This accidental double feature turned our empty movie theaters into pop-up cities, tiny but diverse, with two tentpole films like adjacent storefronts on the street.”
Prof. Jinhua Zhao writes for Boston Magazine about how artificial intelligence could help improve the MBTA system. “When something significant happens on public transportation—the line is down, the road is congested, some bridge is blocked—the customer is suddenly stuck in the system and needs more help,” writes Zhao. “For when that happens, we developed a solution to send individualized guidance for a better transit option to that person, communicated by text message or an app.”
Nature reporter Andrew Robinson spotlights “Atlas of the Senseable City” a new book co-authored by Prof. Carlo Ratti. The book is a “highly illustrated collection of digital maps,” Robinson notes, adding that it “analyzes four essential urban dimensions: motion, connection, circulation and experience.”
This past spring, Prof. J. Phillip Thompson and MIT lecturer Elisabeth Reynolds taught a class at MIT that sent students to work with local officials across the country to help identify available federal funds for climate change mitigation, reports Farah Stockman for The New York Times. “We have to figure out how to use it. Because if we don’t, wealthy communities will go green, and low-income communities will stay brown,” says Thompson. “Unless we do something intentionally to make sure that it is fair, it will bypass poor communities.”
Prof. Carlo Ratti writes for Financial Times about how new AI algorithms can impact the property market. “To train a real estate bot, our lab at MIT used pictures of 20,000 houses around Boston, as well as data that measured how their prices changed over time,” write Ratti. “When other variables were added — such as structural information and neighbourhood amenities — our algorithm was able to make very accurate predictions of how prices would change over time.”
Researchers from MIT have found that since the Covid-19 pandemic, there has been a decrease in the number of interactions between people from different socioeconomic backgrounds, reports Danny Westneat for The Seattle Times. “It’s creating an urban fabric that is actually more brittle, in the sense that we are less exposed to other people,” says research scientist Esteban Moro. “We don’t get to know other people in the city … to know other people’s needs. If we don’t see them around the city, that will be impossible.”
Prof. Carlo Ratti writes for Nikkei Asia about the importance of world expositions. “We do not need expos to showcase products across the world, but we do need them as playful, experimental sandboxes for testing ideas and trialing concepts,” writes Ratti. “Putting the focus on innovation would not require wholesale reinvention, but instead a re-emphasis on an element that has been part of expos since the beginning.”