Changing Cities ~ Prototype New Urban Systems

I'm leading a module this Fall 2014 in the Changing Cities course taught by my MIT Media Lab colleagues Kent Larson and Ryan Chin, starting Wednesday, 3 September at 2pm, as part of our MIT Cities Initiative. We seek to move beyond so-called “Smart City” solutions that have focused on optimization rather than vital re-invention. This course will focus on how to design and prototype new urban systems to address the challenges of mobility, food, living & working, planning, and more through five “How to” modules:

1. How to prototype autonomous, shared, electric mobility systems 
2. How to prototype hyper-efficient, transformable spaces (robotic architecture) 
3. How to prototype controlled environment urban food systems 
4. How to realize computational urbanism using augmented tangible models 
5. How to quantify innovation, entrepreneurship, and creative vitality in cities

Together with colleagues Daan Archer, Jennifer Saura, and Dan Harple, we're keen on #5 -- Our overarching goal is to seek better indices (or rankings or scores) and analyses of vitality in the city by tapping into novel datasets and new analytic approaches. Ultimately we aspire to compare and contrast not only cities and neighborhoods, as they exist today, but simulate how they might become as new urban systems and solutions are deployed.