Lawrence J.

Vale
Changing Cities
75 Years of Planning Better Futures at MIT
2008 by Lawrence J. Vale and the SA+P Press.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be
reproduced, in any form, without written permission from
the publisher.
Vale, Lawrence J.
Changing Cities: 75 Years of Planning Better Futures at
MIT / Lawrence J. Vale.
ISBN 978-0-9794774-2-3
Published in the United States by SA+P Press.
Support for this catalogue and its related exhibition
was provided by the Department of Urban Studies and
Planning, and the Wolk Gallery, School of Architecture +
Planning.
Developed from an exhibition at the Wolk Gallery, MIT
School of Architecture + Planning, February 12 - April 11,
2008. Exhibition curated and written by Lawrence J. Vale,
in collaboration with Gary Van Zante, Laura Knott and
Gabrielle Bendiner-Viani/ Buscada Design.
Exhibition & Catalogue design: Buscada Design
SA PMIT SCHOOL OF ARCHITECTURE + PLANNING DUSPMIT
Dedicated to the Students and Alumni/ae of MITs Course in City Planning
Contents
2 Acknowledgments
4 Preface
12 Planning at MIT: An Introduction
14 Up from Adams
25 The Burdell Committee & The Doctoral Program
28 The Joint Center
31 Ciudad Guayana
35 City Image & City Design: The Lynchian Tradition
41 Planning, The Revolution
47 Planning in Communities
50 Affordable Housing
58 Environmental Policy & Planning
62 The Laboratory of Architecture & Planning
65 The Center for Real Estate
68 International Development
74 Practica
78 DUSP in New Orleans
81 DUSP in China
85 Technologies & Cities
88 Changing Cities: Is there a DUSP way?
90 A Growing Department
92 An Urbanized and Urbanizing Planet
94 Appendix I: Here We Go Again: Recurring Questions Facing DUSP
107 Appendix II: Trends in Cities, Planning, and Development
121 Appendix III: Tomorrow the Universe
130 Notes
133 Images
2
Work on this exhibition and catalogue began in 2004, and I am particularly grateful to
Diana Sherman (MCP 05) and Alison Novak (MCP 06) for their initial assistance with
archival examination. Since then, I have been ably assisted by David Lee (SB/MCP 07),
PhD candidate Annis Whitlow (MCP 04), Amy Stitely (MCP 08), and Gena Peditto
(MCP 07). Many faculty and staff members, as well as alumni have assisted with various
aspects of the exhibition, answering questions, digging up materials and supporting the
many technical needs of the project. I am particularly grateful to Cherie Abbanat (MCP
97), Paula Anzer (MCP 89), Anna Livia Brand, Mary Jane Daly (MCP 83), Judy Daniels,
Nimfa de Leon, Joe Ferreira (PhD 71), Dennis Frenchman (MCP/MArchAS 76), Ezra
Glenn, Reinhard Goethert, Bomee Jung (MCP 07), Langley Keyes (PhD 67), Duncan
Kincaid (MArch 97), Janice OBrien, Bill Porter (PhD 69), Francisca Rojas (MCP 00),
Joe Savitzky (MCP 58), Hattie Silberberg (MCP 08), Bob Simha (MCP 57), Ben Stone
(MCP 08), Tim Terway (MCP 07), and Karen Yegian. Anne Dodge (MCP 06) took
charge of videotaping and editing interviews with several long-time faculty, which added
considerably to the exhibition. Frank Hebbert (MCP 08) proactively created the world
urbanization map that appears in this volume; over the 6 months that we discussed and
refned it, he has proved both dogged and innovative. Throughout the last year I have
depended on Gary Van Zante, Curator of Architecture & Design at the MIT Museum. He
has been a model partner, ably assisted by Laura Knott (SMVS 87). I have also greatly
enjoyed working with Gabrielle Bendiner-Viani of Buscada Design, who has designed the
exhibition and this catalogue.
Acknowledgments
Changing Cities
75 Years of Planning Better Futures at MIT
4
Each morning as I walk into my offce in the Department
headquarters, I pass a bronze plaque sponsored by the
American Institute of Certifed Planners honoring Frederick
Johnstone Adams as a National Planning Pioneer. I know
Adams as the founder of MITs planning course in 1933,
but never knew him personally, since my own arrival at
MIT occurred well after his death in 1979 (never mind
the fact that the plaque says he died in 1980). In theory,
Fred Adams and I have held the same title Department
Head but he was charged with inventing and staffng a
new course (while leading a new profession). In contrast,
my very different challenge has been to navigate, mediate,
moderate, advocate, promote, cajole, and sometimes
attempt to herd a sprawling department that currently lists
241 subjects in its curriculum and regularly has about 80
different people teaching our students. In 2007 alone,
more students graduated from the Department than in
the years 1935-1949 combined. In the early days, everyone
took a common set of classes; today, no two students ever
graduate having taken an identical curriculum. One more
point of contrast: In 1933, MITs tuition was $500 for the
year about 70 times less than it is today. Even factoring
in a 1500% rise in the c.p.i. over the last 75 years, the old
days look like a bargain. Fortunately, the Department now
annually offers about $3 million in fnancial aid, though
this still falls far short of meeting the actual need of our
students.
As I approach the end of my own stint as Department Head
it has seemed worth seizing the occasion of our 75th year
to pause and refect on where we have been and where we
may next be heading. This volume, and the Wolk Gallery
exhibition that spawned it, is the product of that search.
Preface
Planning
Urban Studies
Change
5
Core Dilemmas: Studios, PIP, PEP, QR, and Gateway
The main text of this volume has relatively little to say about developments in curriculum
and pedagogy, in large part because proper discussion of those topics requires both more
documentation and different sorts of documentation than can easily be provided in
the format of an exhibition or catalogue. It is important to acknowledge up front, however,
that considerations for what we teach and how we teach it have always been at the heart
of Departmental life. The frst three decades of MITs city planning course are frequently
assumed to have been a time of unexamined consensus over a core curriculum centered
on physical planning. Yet, even seven decades ago, students and faculty were restlessly
interventionist. In 1940, Fred Adams polled the MCP graduates about their experiences.
As the following excerpts from their replies suggest, even then there was no agreement
about which elements mattered most for an education in city planning:
In general, I should say that there was too much emphasis on drudgery and not enough on
brain work. There was too much time spent in the drafting room performing the mechanical
functions of drafting, coloring maps and the like.
--Philip Darling (MCP 40), Assistant Project Planner, United States Housing Authority
More time should be devoted to theory and discussions of fundamental facts and
principles of city planning and less time to design problems. Much more actual pounding
of knowledge into the student is necessary and a little less solving problems according to
individual whims.
--Lloyd Keefe (MCP 40), Planning Technician, Evansville City Planning Commission
It does not seem to me that the curriculum recognizes the importance of regional problems.
--Thomas W. Mackesey (MCP 1938), Instructor in Regional Planning, Cornell University
A masters thesis should be something more than a design problem. The thesis should
represent an original investigationsomething of a research character.
--F. Stuart Chapin, Jr. (MCP 1940), Assistant Regional Planner, Tennessee Valley Authority
The most valuable training is the wide general training in Design. The method is correct
not entirely theoretical problems but problems relating to practical cases.
--J. Ross McKeever (MCP 1936), Planning Assistant, Boston City Planning Board
I fnd my thoughts coming back again and again to the value of design, whether it is for a
town plan, a boating center, a civic center, a shopping center, or an industrial area.
--Charles A. Blessing (MCP 1940), Planning Technician, New Hampshire State Planning &
Development Commission
6
I still think of the course in Social and Economic Factors as one of the most useful I had; I
would like to see more emphasis on both sociology and economics. Furthermore, I would
appreciate better grounding in statisticsDr. Burdell gave us about two weeks, and two
months might be enough.
--John T. Howard (MCP 1936), City Planner, Regional Association of Cleveland
Too often we educate ourselves in such a way that we are scared to death when we are
caught without our books and fles. One should proceed on the assumption that the only
thing he can be certain of having with him at all times is his mind.
--Richard L. Steiner (MCP 1939), Assistant Project Planner, H.S.H.A.
Although these early students evinced no consensus about the relative importance of what
they were taught, it is important to reiterate that, in stark contrast to the individualized
plans of study and the highly differentiated program groups of todays Department, in
the early decades all students shared a common curriculum. Perhaps the main difference
between the frst 35 years of MITs planning course and the next 40 is that the early
students waited to be asked for their post-graduation critiques whereas, starting in
the mid-1960s, students have taken it upon themselves to press for change while still
enrolled. Put simply, efforts to seek constructive institutional transformation within the
Department became seen as practice for post-graduation roles.

The results, championed by both students and faculty, proved dramatic. By the end of
the 1960s, nearly everything about the Department had come into question, leading to
abolition of the mandated core curriculum and required studios. When the required
MCP core curriculum returned in the early 1970s it did so in a new way, centered on
practicewhat Langley Keyes and Larry Susskind termed theory in use. Core classes
included subjects in Economics (with ongoing debates about whether the class should
emphasize political economy or neo-classical microeconomics), Quantitative Methods,
Planning Process, and Institutional Analysis. Our aim, Keyes and Susskind wrote in
1974, will be to educate effective professionals who are well versed in what the traditional
disciplines have to say about the form and structure of human settlements and who are
especially skilled in formulating theories of action that will enable implementation of
constructive social and institutional change. They also urged the Department to draw
tighter boundaries around our areas of special competence, by sorting the existing faculty
into key areas.
1
The department then had three program groups: Community and
Regional Development; Environmental Design; and Public Policy Analysis. Since then, the
7
names and number of program groups have varied considerably, but the overall sense of a
department organized into smaller groups has remained consistent.
In 1982, the Department again reconsidered its core curriculum in the MCP program,
this time creating a new hybrid subject, Planning and Institutional Processes (aka PIP),
jointly taught by Keyes and Donald Schn. Other core subjects, Political Economy for
Planners (aka PEP), taught initially by Bennett Harrison, and Quantitative Reasoning
(aka QR), taught for many years by Mark Schuster, rounded out the common experience
of MCP students for much of the next two decades.
In 2002, following a review led by Dennis Frenchman, the Department again recast
the MCP core curriculum, centering it on two Gateway classes-- Planning Action
and Planning Economics, while retaining required subjects in Microeconomics and
Quantitative Reasoning. The new core also increased the emphasis on communication
skills and required students to take a workshop-style practicum subject.
Despite its many transformations, I still think that the Department of 2008 would be
largely recognizable to a graduate from 1993, or 1983, or 1973--and barely intelligible to a
graduate from 1963 or earlier.
This catalogue is organized both chronologically and thematically, attempting to address
the long gestation of many perennial preoccupations while also giving my sense of our
overall trajectory as a Department. These latter questions are taken up even more explicitly
in two appendices, commissioned originally as preparation for a DUSP Faculty Retreat
held in March 2007. The frst, aptly entitled Here We Go Again, explores a wide range
of recurring questions: issues of departmental mission, core knowledge, departmental
governance, theory vs. practice, place-based vs. policy orientation, professional vs. doctoral
education, student and faculty diversity, funded research and fnancial aid, the role of
program groups, and the Departments ft with the rest of the Institute.
A second appendix, entitled Trends in Cities, Planning, and Development, is more
explicitly forward looking. We need to understand what pressing issues will engage the
current department and cause us to adapt. How will we adjust what we teach and what we
practice in the face of such challenges as climate change, new patterns of migration, racial
and ethnic conficts, new technologies, new forms of complex decision-making, the return
8
to large-scale development, and the emergence of a hybrid public-private realm? Can we
help bring about a new kind of holistic conception of the city-region? Our symposia held
on April 4, 2008 represent a start at engaging these questions, but there is much more to
be done.
A third and fnal appendix is a treasured artifact from an earlier effort at celebration and
commemoration. In 1956, to mark the 20th anniversary of the Departments frst MCP
degree, Melvin Levine (MCP 56) penned a musical satire of the department and planning
profession, appropriately entitled Tomorrow the World. Other graduates of that era
recall a rich departmental musical life, much of it orchestrated by Mel: Lloyd Rodwin on
drums, Walter Isard on violin, Burnham Kelly on clarinet. Sadly, Mel passed away in late
2007, so we include this appendix to honor his memory and recall his humor.
MIT-Affliated National Planning Pioneers
(American Institute of Certifed Planners)
Charles Abrams (faculty)
Frederick Adams (faculty)
F. Stuart Chapin, Jr. (alum)
Carl Feiss (alum)
John Tasker Howard (alum, faculty)
T.J. Kent (alum)
Kevin Lynch (alum, faculty)
Lewis Mumford (visiting faculty)
Flavel Shurtleff (faculty)
Francis Violich (alum)
MIT-Affliated Distinguished Planning Educators
(Association of Collegiate Schools of Planning)
F. Stuart Chapin, Jr. (alum)
Susan Fainstein (alum)
John Friedmann (former faculty)
John A. Parker (alum)
Lisa Redfeld Peattie (faculty)
Lloyd Rodwin (faculty)
Lawrence Susskind (alum, faculty)
Faculty who have won Guggenheim Fellowships
Lloyd Rodwin (1964)
Robert Fogelson (1973)
Richard Sennett (1973)
Bernard Frieden (1975)
Martin Rein (1978)
Frank Levy (1986)
Lawrence Vale (1995)
Anne Whiston Spirn (2007)
9
Staffng the Department
Throughout its history, the
Department has depended
mightily on the dedicated service
of staff and support staff. To date,
three key staff people have each
served the Department for at least
two decades: Administrative
Offcer Rolf Engler (1971-2002),
Student Services Coordinator
Sandy Wellford (1973-present) and
SPURS Administrator Nimfa de
Leon (1985-present).
10
Student Life
From the 1930s through the
mid-1960s, student life in the
City Planning course centered on
physical design studios.
Other classes used informal
classroom settings, such as this
session with Joe Ferreira [middle
right] and a meeting of the PEP
class led by Ben Harrison
[below, seated at right].
11
Out of the Classroom
City Planning students Bernie
Brenner (MCP 58) Joe Savitzky
(MCP 58) and architecture student
Julian Beinart, seated (MArch
56, later to join the MIT faculty),
managed to ft in a camping trip
with some as-yet-unidentifed
female companions, circa 1956.
Not to be left out, Department
faculty have also occasionally
managed a social life, as
suggested by this image from a
gathering of colleagues from the
international development group
during the 1990s.
[Left to right: Diane Davis, Judith
Tendler, Bish Sanyal, Lisa Peattie,
and Ralph Gakenheimer]
12
Coincident with the frst 75 years of City Planning
education at MIT, the percentage of the worlds population
living in urbanized areas has doubled. For the frst time in
human history, city dwellers now constitute the planets
majority. With this fundamental change, the meanings of
both cities and planning have been irrevocably altered.
Cities, never separable from their hinterlands, are now
even more inevitably recognized as city-regions. Planning,
never solely about plan-making, is now even more wholly
engaged with questions of process and implementation.
Never simply a matter of physical form-making, planning
is now thoroughly integrated with larger study of the social,
economic, political, and cultural aspects of urban life. In
this context, Changing Cities is both a description of the
urbanization that has occurred, and a call to action.
As an academic home for training planners and those who
interpret what planners do, MITs program has always
done more than staff a profession; it has endeavored to
change it. To do so, the program has responded to three
successive national and international crises: the socio-
economic challenges of the Great Depression and the
reinvigoration of the public sector; the socio-political
upheavals of the late-1960s and the calls for community
action; and the present-day socio-environmental challenges
of an imperiled planet.
Planning at MIT: An Introduction
Planning
Urban Studies
Change
1
13
14
In 1932, William Emerson, Dean of the newly established
School of Architecture asked pre-eminent town planner
Thomas Adams to outline a new course in city planning.
Recognizing its importance to the study of architecture,
Emerson presented this outline to MIT president Karl
Taylor Compton, noting that MITs course would differ
from those at Harvard and Cornell because it approaches
city planning defnitely from the architectural standpoint.
Concluding that the Institute needed an additional $4200/
year to establish the course, Emerson made a remarkable
offer: he and his wife would underwrite $2000 for the
frst 5 years if the Institute supplied the remaining $2200.
Compton noted, Professor Emerson expressed the opinion
that the son of Mr. Thomas Adams...will be an ideal man
to put in charge of this course.
2
And so, with the School of
Architecture still located in lonely isolation in Boston and
the nation mired in the Great Depression, the new course
in City Planning gained both its budget and its frst leader:
Frederick J. Adams.
In the earliest years of the program, Adams artfully dodged
accusations from Cornells Gilmore Clarke that the new
courses in City Planning were neither fesh, fowl, nor
red herring and countered Clarkes assertion that city
planning practice required a group of what we might call
supermen, expected to be trained in too many disciplines.
Adams retorted that he had more faith in the opinions of
my father [and] Sir Raymond Unwin since they, unlike
Clarke, were practicing city planners.
3

In the programs frst decade, the faculty consisted of
Fred Adams, visiting lecturers including Thomas Adams,
Sir Raymond Unwin and Marjorie S. Cautley, and other
faculty including Joseph Woodruff and Flavel Shurtleff,
Up from Adams
Planning pioneers
New courses
Growth & succession
2
15
co-founder of the American City Planning Institute (precursor to the APA). In 1934,
Edwin Burdell established the frst class on Social and Economic Factors in City
Planning. This early struggle to balance research with practice, and socio-economic
considerations with design, foreshadowed fundamental debates that would re-emerge
throughout the Departments history.
Following the end of World War II, student enrollment in the planning course quickly
doubled, with the graduate MCP program increasingly dominant. The course gained
departmental status in 1947, as the faculty grew: Roland Greeley and Homer Hoyt joined
in 1944, followed by Burnham Kelly in 1945, Lloyd Rodwin in 1946, Kevin Lynch in 1948,
Jack Howard in 1949. Charles Abrams in 1950, Louis Wetmore in 1952 and Walter Isard
in 1953.
Many alumni from this period became leaders in planning internationally or broke
barriers of race and gender. Antonio Cruz Kayanan, class of 1942, was a founding
member of the Puerto Rican Society of Planning. Norma F. Satten, class of 1945,
became an important advocate for the elderly. Samuel Cullers, FAICP, the frst African
American to graduate from the program, in 1952, went on to lead planning teams in
Bangkok, Thailand; Chicago, IL; Toronto, Canada; and the California State Offce of
Planning. Serafn Garcia Aquino, class of 1953, returned to the Philippines and founded
the Philippine Institute of Environmental Planners with colleagues. As president of that
organization from 1992-1993, Aquino was instrumental in working with the national
government under President Fidel V. Ramos to establish the Board of Environmental
Planners, bringing national recognition to the planning feld in the Philippines for the
frst time. By 1954, fully one-third of the Departments graduate students came from
abroad.
After more than two decades of leadership, Fred Adams sought out a successor. Gordon
Stephenson (MCP 38), Professor of Civic Design at the University of Liverpool, emerged
as the top choice for the position in 1955. Both Stephenson and MIT were startled when
his application for a visa was abruptly denied, ostensibly due to his modest role in a society
promoting Cultural Relations with the Soviet Union during the late 1940s. Stephenson
instead took up a Chair at the University of Toronto, noting in his memoir, Our plan to
return permanently to MIT and New England had gone sadly awry. After living through
16
It is my belief that freedom of thought and action,
within the limits of our accepted and painfully
established moral, ethical, and legal codes, is
something to cherish. It is probably one of the reasons
why MIT, where the spirit of enquiry is tremendously
strong, invited me to join its faculty... It would seem
that I am to be prevented from fulflling this because
of the machinery of administrative justice, which is but
ill-related to the natural justice, gradually accepted
over a long period of time as basic to the American and
British ways of life.
5
Gordon Stephenson [left, on a visit in 1980]
Stephenson was married to Flora Crockett, MITs frst
female MCP graduate [far left].
World War II in England my wife was to return home, and I was to be head of the most
important planning school in the English-speaking world. It was not to be.
4

The Department could change cities, but could not change the McCarthyite politics of the
era. With Stephenson rebuffed, Adams stayed on and the Department found a new head
from within its own ranks. Aside from a failed attempt to hire sociologist S.M. Miller in
1970, it would be a full ffty years before the Department ever again looked outside for a
new department head.
17
[right] Students in 1940 gathered
with Prof. Adams. From the start,
MIT planning students were invited
to critique the course, a
tradition that continues to this day.
In 1940, Adams got an earful from
an ex-student and his successor:
I see city planning less and less
as a design profession... In fact,
too much skill in drafting and
detail design may lead a planner to
spend his time working out curb-
radii... instead of attending to the
important large-scale activities.
6

- John T. Howard (MCP 1936), Planner,
Regional Association of Cleveland
Urbanist Lewis Mumford was a
frequent visitor to the Department
in the 1940s, 1950s, and 1970s. As
Bemis Visiting Professor in the late
1950s, Mumford completed some
of the work on his landmark study
The City in History.
18
Sir Raymond Unwin [far left], the
famous English town planner,
gave a series of eight lectures
during December 1933 and January
1934, and was a frequent visitor
throughout the 1930s.
The aim of the planner, Unwin
told the inaugural cohort of MIT
planning students, must be to
place all his parts and buildings
in such relation one to the other
as to permit the life of the town
to fourish with the least possible
moving to and fro of goods and
persons.
7
1. Raymond Unwin
2.Philip V. Darling (MCP 40)
3. F. Stuart Chapin, Jr. (MCP 40)
4. James J. Souder (B. Arch 36)
5. Walter A. Wachter (MCP 39)
6. Stephen A. Kaufman (MCP 40)
7. Charles A. Blessing (MCP 39)
8. Richard L. Steiner (MCP 39)
9. Jane S. Rodman (MCP 40)
10. Unidentifed B. Arch in city
planning student
19
Frederick Adams
Frederick Johnstone Adams, born in London in 1901, was
educated in Canada and the U.K. before obtaining his
B.Arch from Columbia University in 1928. He worked with
Clarence Stein and Henry Wright on the construction of
Radburn, New Jersey and took up the post of Assistant
Professor at MIT in 1932. Founder of the Planning course,
he served from 1947-1957 as the frst head of MITs
Department of City and Regional Planning.
Although his program at MIT began as part of the
architecture department, with a studio-dominated
curriculum, Adams always insisted on integrating social
and economic issues. By 1938, he had introduced subjects
such as Planning and Housing Legislation, History and
Principles of City Planning, Theory and Practice of City
Planning, and City Planning Research, in addition to Site
Planning and Construction, Theory of Site Planning, and
City Planning Design studios.
1st Dept. Head 1947- 1957
President, American
Institute of Planners
20
Early recipients of MITs planning
degrees went on to found or lead
planning departments around the
country.
[top left to right]
Francis Violich (38) and Thomas J.
Kent (43) were founding members
of the University of California at
Berkeleys Department of City &
Regional Planning.
[center left to right]
Burnham Kelly (40) and Thomas
Mackesey (38) both joined the
faculty at Cornell University and
led major changes in planning
education there.
3 of the 4 MCP graduates from
1946 went on to found the planning
department at the University of
North Carolina, Chapel Hill: John A.
Parker as dean, and James Murray
Webb and Pearson Stewart as
faculty members. Parker next hired
F. Stuart Chapin (40). [not shown]
[below]
Louis B. Wetmore graduated with
a B.Arch in City Planning in 1936
and went on to head the Dept
of City Planning & Landscape
Architecture at the University of
Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in
1955, joined by Lachlan (Lock)
Blair (49). Wetmore later led the
formulation of the national Model
Cities program.
21
Another early graduate, Henry Cohen (MCP 44) [above left] joined the American army in Germany shortly after
graduation, and wrote Fred Adams a remarkable letter from German front while the war still raged, expressing
the idealism inspired by his education and his hope that men will be able to say that London was replanned
not because of Nazi bombs, but because the County Council was inspired by high ideals: that the ruins we make
here were not caused by a destructively-inspired coalition of people, but by a humanity intent on liberating and
giving all the opportunities for a free and new life.
8
In 1946 (at age 23) Cohen was appointed director of the
Fhrenwald refugee camp in Germanys American Zone, where he was responsible for ensuring the well-being of
more than 5,000 Jewish survivors of the Holocaust. Confrming this early evidence of leadership ability, he went
on to a distinguished career in New York City government, and then became the founding Dean of the Milano
Graduate School of Management and Urban Policy at New Yorks New School.
Alan Voorhees (MCP 49) founded the transportation consulting frm of Alan M. Voorhees & Associates, Inc.,
which grew to include 10 offces in the United States, as well as offces in Caracas, London, Melbourne, So
Paulo, Toronto, and Zurich. Voorhees later became dean of the College of Architecture, Art, and Urban Sciences at
the University of Illinois-Chicago.
Israel Stollman (MCP 48) [above far right] went on to lead the program at Ohio State, as did Carl Feiss (MCP 38)
at Columbia University and Gordon Stephenson (MCP 38) at the University of Toronto. Stollman later gained
national attention as founding Executive Director of the American Planning Association, where he served from
1978 to 1993.
22
John Tasker (Jack) Howard
The 1959 department brochure perfectly encapsulates the underlying ethos of the Howard
era: The objective of the planner is the development of the most satisfying and effcient
physical environment in which people may live, work, and play. Howard also expected
students to transmit ideas in 3 languages: words, numbers, and pictures.
Howard explained, We were not pariahs to the architects. We were close relatives. From
time to time, I would tell an architecture student that architects are to planners what
plumbers are to architects, but they didnt take that very seriously.
9
Although Howard lived in suburban Wayland, he was an early critic of sprawl, observing
that spread-out suburbs put children at the mercy of their mothers who have to serve as
chauffeurs. It is neither good for the kids, or their mothers. Yet, Howard also championed
the liberating power of the car, seemingly oblivious to pressures of class and race: The
automobile has made the slums of the city obsolete. With the automobile the workers
can move out to the open spaces and the slum areas can be redeveloped into a pleasing
area.
10
1st undergraduate class (1935)
1st MCP class (1936)
2nd Department Head 1957-1970
President, American Institute of Planners
23
[above] Study of highways and population in
Northeastern Massachusetts prepared for the Ipswich
Planning Board, Frederick J. Adams, c. 1935. The frm
of Adams, Howard and Greeley, founded in 1949,
expanded the infuence of MIT planning faculty beyond
New England to include metropolitan plans for the San
Francisco Bay area and Washington D.C., as well as the
plan for Gandhidham, a new port city in India.
24
[above] A rehabilitation study of East Cambridge, MA.
Theodore S. Bacon (56) & M.T. Cooke.
This land-use analysis of the area near MIT during the
mid-1950s includes Kendall Square at lower left.
25
The Burdell Committee &
The Doctoral Program
Authorized expansion
Social Sciences
First Ph.D.s
Much of the current form of the Department of Urban
Studies and Planning owes itself to the far-seeing work
of a small group known formally as the Ad Hoc
Committee to Advise President Killian on Educational
and Research Activities in the Field of City and Regional
Planning at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Chaired by Edwin Burdell, then the president of Cooper
Union, the committee was charged with determining
whether the fedgling Department should expand into a
new Center for Urban and Regional Studies and develop
a doctoral program, or should become reabsorbed into
the Department of Architecture. The Burdell Committee
argued strongly for creating a Center alive to changes
affecting cities and regions, noting that more
research and exploration are needed to discover a ftting
environment for peace-time living to match and then
exceed the research now directed to preparation for war.
The committee favored establishment of a Ph.D. program,
since it would add greatly in recruiting research and
teaching staff and good students, especially from the social
sciences.
11
Established in 1958, the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in
City and Regional Planning, initially required students to
have reading knowledge of two foreign languages, and to
prepare for an examination in four felds, one of which had
to be planning theory. Other felds included planning
techniques; transportation and utilities planning; land-use
economics and planning; plan implementation; regional
planning; urban design; science, technology, and planning;
physical planning problems of developing areas; and social
and cultural aspects of planning.
Authorized expansion
Social Sciences
First Ph.D.s
3
26
[above] Chairman Edwin Burdell
[left] Proposing committee members
[below, clockwise from top left]
Bernard Frieden received the
departments frst Ph.D. degree, in
1962. A longtime faculty member
and noted scholar of housing &
urban development, he served
as MITs Chair of the Faculty and
Associate Dean of the School of
Architecture + Planning.
M. Christine Boyer has had a
distinguished career at Columbia,
Cooper Union, and Princeton, and
was the departments frst female
Ph.D. graduate, in 1972. Other
early women doctoral graduates
who enjoyed great academic
success include Judith Innes (PhD.
1973) at UC Berkeley, and Rachel
Bratt (PhD 1976) at Tufts.
Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala (Ph.D. 1981)
[here with Bono at the 2007 Africa-
Europe Energy Forum in Berlin]
has served as Nigerias Minister of
Finance and as Managing Director
of the World Bank.
27
Calling efforts to limit the independence of the city planning program a
disastrous retreat by the Institute, Burdells committee sought to enable
departmental growth. They also accepted committee member Clarence
Steins plea to continue broader development of design skills, even while
proposing closer embrace of the social sciences.
28
Established in 1959, the MIT-Harvard Joint Center
for Urban Studies focused on several felds: the
structure, growth, and form of the city; the problems of
transportation, housing, and regional physical development
(both in the United States and in developing areas);
and the infuence of technology, social values, and public
policies and controls on planning problems and processes.
Co-founder Lloyd Rodwin observed that its research style
was shaped by three lofty aims, two nasty constraints, one
extraordinary opportunity, and one or perhaps two twinges
of conscience.
12
It aimed at increasing basic knowledge of
cities and regions, building bridges between research and
policy at all levels, and enriching teaching programs at MIT
and Harvard, but was constrained by shortages of money
and staff. It embraced the contract research opportunity to
develop a new industrial city in southern Venezuela, while
still focusing the bulk of effort on Boston and the United
States.
The Joint Centers researchers struggled over their
relationship with the people they studied. As Rodwin
observed, there is diffculty in identifying community goals
and there is also the problem that the benefts go to one
group while the costs fall on another and there is as yet
no adequate analytical basis for making interpersonal and
intergroup comparisons.
13
In the end, Rodwin himself admitted to signifcant
shortcomings: The Joint Center has been much more
successful in testing, ventilating, and to a lesser extent
generating ideas and serving the educational mission of
its two institutions than in solving problems for action
agencies; and as for solving problems, it has been more
successful far away than close to home.
14
The Joint Center
Cities and Regions
Research meets Policy
Classic books
4
29
MITs Lloyd Rodwin [above far left] and Harvards Martin Meyerson
contemplate a model city, c. 1961
MIT Professor Robert Wood [far right] returned from HUD to direct the
Joint Center in 1970
[below] Mapping out Ciudad Guayana
30
By 1967, Joint Center researchers had produced more than twenty books
and thirty monographs, many of them classics. The Joint Centers work, as
a whole, was far from celebratory about the prospects of planning.
As the scope and training of planners broadened, they encountered
some of the most withering criticisms of comprehensive planning ever
launched.
31
The Joint Center became the advisor to Venezuelas
Guayana Development Corporation (CVG) for all phases
of city and regional development, what Rodwin called
the largest new city development program in Latin
Americaand perhaps the world. The project prompted
much uneasiness about the Joint Centers foreign
policy. As Rodwin put it, There was concern about the
instability of Venezuelan politics, the fear of being tagged
as representatives of Yankee imperialism, the problems of
staffng an operation in a different culture.... On the other
hand, the proposal presented an extraordinary opportunity
to help develop a multi-dimensional strategy for a
developing country to help prepare the economic, social,
physical, administrative, and educational development
policies for the region, to innovate new methods of
analyzing and grappling with these problems, and to
develop a series of major studies recording and evaluating
this experience. After weighing the pros and cons, the Joint
Center chose to grasp the nettle.
15
In Rodwins assessment, the joint effort along the
Orinoco proved successful: I do not mean to say that
there werent constraints, limited perspectives, mistakes,
squabbles, and other diffculties. There were. These were
human beings, with different backgrounds, values and
interests, thinking, discussing, disagreeing often with
passion. Nonetheless, there were satisfactory resolutions
of most diffculties, and both CVG and the Joint Center
parted amicably when the work was completed.
16
Ciudad Guayana
New citymaking
Regional development
5
32
The planners had concerned
themselves with issues of
economic effciency, amenity,
social equity, and community.
The city as it has evolved is
conspicuously lacking on all four
counts. Lisa Peattie, Planning:
Rethinking Ciudad Guayana
[left] Ciudad Guayana 1967
[far left] Ciudad Guayana aerial
1964, and [left] aerial 1967
[below] Ciudad Guayana in 2007,
where the population is estimated
to be more than 800,000.
33
Lisa Peattie
What I did in Venezuela was neither social action, except
as a human being with other human beings acts and
interacts, nor was it research in the conventional sense, for
I had no problem, no research design. I was trying to fnd
out what an anthropologist could learn and say that would
contribute to planning in that situation.
The View from the Barrio
What I found in Guayana was passion, intention, and
struggle. The world became politicized for me. Writing
became discussion and argument. The anthropology of
description would never satisfy me again.
Planning: Rethinking Ciudad Guayana
Representation
Critique
Anthropology
34
Peatties feldwork led to two
classic books, The View from the
Barrio (1968) [chapter headings
at left] and Planning: Rethinking
Ciudad Guayana (1987), which
attempted to explain why the rest
of the team failed to listen to their
anthropologist.
In 1962 Peattie was appointed
Project Anthropologist for the
Ciudad Guayana venture. She and
her children lived for 2-1/2 years
in an earth-walled house in the
shantytown of Barrio La Laja.
In 1968, Peattie became the
departments frst tenured female
professor.
[left] Proposed new market for San
Flix. In Peatties view: These
renderings of places introduce
people, residents of the city,
quietly enjoying the designers
work, not contending with each
other within it or contesting the
planners right to arrange things.
35
City Image & City Design:
The Lynchian Tradition
Most of Kevin Lynchs ideas about city form were already
percolating during his frst years as an assistant professor.
As early as 1951, he urged that MITs department create a
new Center for Urban Research focused on the basic
question that would mark his life-long passion: What
should be the physical form of the metropolitan region in
the future? Lynch knew it was an unwieldy and normative
question that could not be answered directly by research.
Nonetheless, he argued, it could be used as a basic
direction and as a means for assessing whether research
projects held any signifcance.
17
Thirty years later, Lynch
wrote A Theory of Good City Form. As a Boston Globe
memorial editorial put it, Lynchs work was pioneering
because, unlike more imperious city planners, he consulted
people frst and plans second.
18

A tribute essay written by three of his colleagues observed
that, Throughout his years at MIT, Kevin kept his hand
in practice, testing his ideas, forming new ones, making
things. He was a brilliant and subtle designer, always
looking for those few simple strokes which would both
give form to a place and open it to the creativity of its
users. He always began with the site and the people who
used it or lived on it. He believed in the right and ability of
individuals and communities to shape and manage their
own environments and pushed gently but frmly at the
institutions and governments who hired him to recognize
that right. Working nearly always as a member of a team,
he entered his ideas in simple words and sketches, letting
them sink or swim on their own merits.
19
Design and Development
Mental maps
Normative goals
6
36
Kevin Lynch, shown seated 2nd from left, studied
architecture with Frank Lloyd Wright at Taliesin during
the late 1930s.
37
[above] Composite view of the imageability of Downtown Los Angeles in
the late 1950s as seen by its residents.
38
Kevin Lynch
An environment that facilitates recalling and learning is
a way of linking the living moment to a wide span of time.
Being alive is being awake in the present, secure in our
ability to continue but alert to the new things that come
streaming by. We feel our own rhythm, and feel also that
it is part of the rhythm of the world. It is when local time,
local place, and our own selves are secure that we are
ready to face challenge, complexity, vast space, and the
enormous future.
What Time is This Place? 1972
Imageability
City form
39
[above] Lynchs classic sketch showing problems with the image of
Boston, used in The Image of the City.
It is clear that the form of a city or a metropolis will not exhibit some
gigantic, stratifed order. It will be a complicated pattern, continuous and
whole, yet intricate and mobile. It must be plastic to the perceptual habits
of thousands of citizens, open-ended to change of function and meaning,
receptive to the formation of new imagery. It must invite its viewers to
explore the world. The Image of the City, 1960
40
After his retirement, Lynch worried that the
Environmental Design program might fade away, but
was heartened by Dennis Frenchmans leadership of
the group. Renamed the Joint Program in City Design
& Development [CDD] in the late 1990s, it is again
headed by Frenchman.
40 years after The Image of the City, a CDD colloquium
examined Lynchs legacy in the light of new media,
published as Imaging the City. DUSPs CDD
faculty continues to explore issues of land-use and
community growth (Philip Herr and Terry Szold), urban
design studios in the U.S. and around the world (Gary
Hack, Tunney Lee, John de Monchaux, and Dennis
Frenchman), questions of design standards (Eran
Ben-Joseph), production of urban identity (Lawrence
Vale), the role of urban natural systems (Anne Spirn),
links between transportation and environmental
performance (Christopher Zegras) and connections
among city design, public policy, and preservation
(Mark Schuster). The Lynchian infuence has remained
salient in the City Design curriculum, most notably
through the Theory of City Form subject, taught by
Lynch and/or Julian Beinart every year for more than a
half-century.
DUSP biannually presents the Kevin Lynch Award to
honor outstanding contributions to the making of
places that invoke and capture a generous relationship
between an urban place and the people who use it.
The diversity of recent awardees includes: Bostons
First Night (1990); planner Allan B. Jacobs (1999);
Chicago Mayor Richard M. Daley (2005); and the
planners who championed The Vancouver Model
(2007).
41
By 1968, Jack Howard was forced to acknowledge the
changing nature of the city planning feld. At MIT, he
observed, Physical environmental change remains a
strong element, but [is] now balanced by an equally strong
thrust to plan and accomplish social change directly, as
well as and in concert with socially valuable economic
and physical change.
20

Dean Lawrence B. Anderson captured the sentiment
of the day in both sketches and words: Since old-style
professionalism has too often addressed the wrong
problems, students and faculty alike are becoming
suspicious of the merits of theoretical exercises that
lead to correct solutions on paper, especially when they
presume to deal not just with physical phenomena but
with the welfare of human beings. Planning schools like
MIT attracted students because they viewed it as a means
to address the urban crisis. Many of them, Anderson
observed, are now less likely to ask how a plan is to be
implemented, and more likely to inquire about who wants
to do it and why, and whether it is worth doing.
21

In such a changing intellectual climate, in 1967, students
demanded, and faculty agreed, to make studio classes
optional, and the Department abolished the last vestiges
of a core curriculum in 1968. Howard viewed this
student revolt as an exceedingly well-mannered and
good-humored confrontation, one that gained the full
support of both older and younger faculty. That said, he
clearly understood that the students earned the credit for
initiating the timely reform.
22

Four students wrote to complain: To avoid misleading its
students, the Department has largely ceased to lead them at
Planning, The Revolution
Student revolt
Core-less curriculum
Activism
7
42
all. . . While the elimination of core curriculum allowed students to be much more fexible
in pursuit of a wider range of interests, it also reduced dialogue on basic issues in and
out of planning: in the absence of required or comprehensive subjects, students choose
courses that confrm their existing substantive or ideological biases.
23
Despite the fux
of the curriculum, interest in the Department reached an all-time high in 1968, with ten
applicants for every space in the MCP program.
If the operative metaphor was to be the academic supermarket, the challenge for faculty
was to sort out how to stack the items and name the aisles.
43
Between 1968 and 1973, the
Department made faculty
appointments in urban sociology,
environmental design, quantitative
methods for urban analysis, urban
anthropology, operations research,
urban law, health planning, urban
management, transportation,
regional economics, social
intervention, communications,
urban politics, urban economics,
and urban history.
Some faculty, such as Herbert
Gans, stayed briefy, while others
such as Martin Rein, Joseph
Ferreira, Lisa Peattie, Frank
Jones, William Wheaton, Ralph
Gakenheimer, Gary Marx, Karen
R. Polenske, Robert Fogelson,
Donald Schn, Bennett Harrison,
William Porter, Tunney Lee, and
Lawrence Susskind would remain
for decades. By the early 1970s the
faculty included 3 tenured women,
Lisa Peattie, Francine Rabinovitz,
and Karen R. Polenske.
In the early 1970s, the department
began to achieve greater racial and
ethnic diversity, but the student
body diversifed most rapidly.
In 1968-69, the Departments MCP
program enrolled only 2 minority
students, and none enrolled in the
doctoral program. 4 years later the
situation had markedly changed:
the MCP program had 23 minority
students46% of the programs
domestic enrollmentand 4
additional minority students
were registered in the doctoral
program. In 1974, the Department
could claim that 1/3 of all
minority students enrolled at MIT
were registered in DUSP. The
department increased its efforts
to recruit students to work with
and for hitherto underrepresented
constituencies, a policy that also
included non-minority students
committed to diversifying the
impact of planning and planners.
44
[left] In 1968, Tunney Lee, soon to join the MIT faculty, served as a key designer for Resurrection City, the large
squatter encampment on the Washington Mall, constructed parallel and adjacent to the Lincoln Memorials
refecting pool as part of the Poor Peoples Campaign for Jobs and Freedom.
Progressive MIT faculty, including Lisa Peattie and Robert Goodman, took the lead in forming Urban Planning
Aid. Starting in the mid-1960s several current and future MIT faculty played leading roles in stopping the
proposed Inner Belt highway from destroying Cambridge neighborhoods. Such action culminated in the Boston
Transportation Planning Review, a comprehensive rethinking of the transport system with extensive and intensive
citizen participation.
Closer to campus, the Department, led by Justin Gray, embarked on an intensive effort to staff the city government
departments of Cambridge and Somerville with city planning students.
Since the 1960s, social policy scholar Martin Rein
[left] has provided trenchant analysis of social reform
strategies.
45
Lloyd Rodwin
In 1967, Rodwin told an audience at the National Planning
Conference that the feld was due for signifcant expansion:
With riots still a clear and present danger, were likely
to get more urban professorships, more funds, and more
talent than in the past; and for this impetus surely the surly
radicals in the civil rights movement deserve a plaque in
the pantheon of the urbanists.
24
As department head from 1970-1974, Rodwin helped
orchestrate just such a revolutionary expansion of the
Departments size and mission.
Expansion
Social Science
Department Head, 1970-1974
46
DCRP to DUSP: Whats In a Name?
In 1969, the Department of City and Regional Planning (DCRP) formally became the
Department of Urban Studies and Planning (DUSP). The name change, like everything
else in the era, refected a newfound and expanding desire to tackle the problems of the
city in as many disciplinary and interdisciplinary dimensions as possible.
Planning alone no longer seemed up to the task, especially if the bad planning decisions
of the past and present could be seen as part of the problem. In the Departments
reinvented form, DUSP graduates did not want to staff the existing planning profession;
once again, they wished to change it.
Undergraduate Program
The City Planning course conferred undergraduate degrees between 1935
and 1954. When Lloyd Rodwin became department head in 1970, he
reintroduced the program, and its rapid growth was ably led by the young
Larry Susskind [top left]. Initially limited to 30 students, it rapidly doubled,
and the program developed an extensive array of research and feld service
activities, with even more students involved with the Department through
MITs Undergraduate Research Opportunities Program (UROP).
[left] Graduate of the undergraduate program, Paul Levy (SB/MCP 74)
went on to lead several state environmental agencies before becoming
CEO of Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center.
After the Revolution
After the Rodwin revolution, however, the Department experienced serious growth pains
and identity problems. By 1974, DUSP faced a serious fnancial bind, saddled with
many appointments that had been supported by the soft money of contract research and
special funds that were no longer available. With about 20 junior faculty on tenure track
from all manner of felds, department head Langley Keyes and Larry Susskind lamented
to Dean Bill Porter that the Departments phenomenal growth had nonetheless failed to
create a clear and viable image for itself within MIT.
25
By the late 1970s continued cuts in outside funding coupled with rising tuition costs and
declining job prospects for graduates, especially in the public sector, caused a reduction in
enrollment and hampered research efforts. DUSP responded by encouraging faculty to
devote more time to sponsored research and initiated new contacts with the private sector.
47
In 1970, the Department launched the Community
Fellows Program, intended to help minority leaders
cope with problems of social and economic development
within their communities. Fellows came from community
development corporations, tenant action groups, private
organizations with action and development components,
state legislative bodies, community health agencies, media
organizations, and academic institutions.
The Department also took concerted steps to increase
the enrollment of under-represented minority students
in the program, aided by substantial funding from the
U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development.
Beginning in 1971, HUD supported 2-year fellowships for
ten students each year. Each participant in this Minority
Intern Program worked 12 hours per week at a variety of
government and community based agencies, and took part
in a special weekly seminar called Planned Change and
Implementation.
In 1968, the Department launched the Cambridgeport
Ecologue Program, a multi-year effort to develop new
participatory methods for engaging the needs of the
diverse residential community near the Institute, and
helping these residents play more active roles in the
planning of their neighborhood. At the same time, the
program endeavored to expose students to theory-building
efforts around group dynamics, social structure, spatial
structure and cognition. Such efforts anticipated the more
concerted engagement with refective practice pioneered
by the research of Donald Schn.
Planning in Communities
Empowerment
Refection
Engaging race
8
48
Melvin King [left, to right of Jesse Jackson] joined
DUSP in 1971 as a lecturer, and took over leadership
of the Community Fellows Program in 1977, following
Frank Jones (who led the program from 1971-1975) and
Hubie Jones (in charge from 1975-1977.)
A member of the Massachusetts Legislature since
1973, King ran for Mayor of Boston in 1983. He won
the primary with the frst Rainbow Coalition, but lost
to Raymond Flynn in the general election.
An example of Kings critique of Boston Mayor Kevin
White: I would give the mayor an A for frivolous
activity so far this term... In terms of critical issues, I
give him an F. Hes done nothing in terms of racism
and violence in the city, the issue of support for
community based economic development, on the
schools.
26
Following Kings retirement as Adjunct Professor in
1996, the Department brought in Dr. Ceasar McDowell
to lead the Community Fellows Program. McDowell, as
Professor of the Practice of Community Development,
created the Center for Refective Community Practice
(CRCP), dedicated to empowering communities by
helping them to know what they know.
Vital Difference: The Role of Race in Building
Community, released in 2004, was the result of a
collaboration between CRCP and fve community
organizations engaged in building democratic
participation aimed at addressing racial exclusion.
CRCP focused its fellowships on building sustained
relationships with particular communities, most
notably the North End of Springfeld, Massachusetts.
In 2007, Dayna Cunningham joined DUSP as Executive
Director of CRCP and, working with several department
faculty, launched its reinvention as the Community
Innovators Lab.
49
Donald Schn
After some four years of experiments with a variety of kinds
of efforts to help students involved in feld work, it is by no
means clear to me what they learn through that experience.
They may be learning:
that it is hard out there
that I am incompetent
that people out there are out to get me.
Often the real world involvement simply overwhelms the
student with more information than he can handle. In this
respect, I have come to feel that reality is over-rated!
Undaunted, Schn started asking tough questions that have
remained central to professional education: What are the
conditions for being able to learn from experience? What
permits the ability to function when you cannot know
in the situation by rigorous standards of knowledge?
27

First articulated in this way in 1972, these ideas coalesced
into notions of refection-in-action, articulated in his
landmark book, The Refective Practitioner.
Refection
Experience
Think in Action
Dept. Head, 1990-1992
50
Concern over housing problems preoccupied MITs course
in city planning right from the start. Edwin Burdell taught
classes on the relationship between housing and planning
during the 1930s and, in 1937, chaired the National
Committee on Instruction and Research in Housing.
Charles Abrams began lecturing about housing at MIT in
1939, and later joined the faculty. Through his books and
worldwide lecturing and consulting, Abrams infuenced
everything from early public housing legislation, to anti-
discrimination efforts, to policies for coping with massive
urbanization in developing countries. During the 1960s
and early 1970s, John F. C. Turner pioneered ways to
deliver vital infrastructure needs to low-income urban
dwellers in developing countries through provision of
sites and services schemes that encouraged self-help
housing.
Mel King and others in the Department played central roles
in the 20-year urban drama known as Tent City, a struggle
over the future of prime land in Bostons South End,
adjacent to what is now the Copley Place complex. During
the urban renewal of the 1960s, city leaders displaced 100
families from brick apartment buildings on this site,
creating a temporary parking lot. On April 26, 1968 local
activists led by King closed down the lot, stating This is a
place for people.
Several other faculty, including Lloyd Rodwin, Bernard
Frieden, Arthur Solomon, Langley Keyes, Phillip Clay,
Lawrence Vale, and Xavier de Souza Briggs, wrote
infuential books and professional reports on many aspects
of low-income housing in the United States.
Affordable Housing
Tent City
Public housing
Self-help
9
51
For three days in 1968, up to 400
people lived on this lot [at left] in
tents and shanties. Thousands
more visited music-flled Tent
City. The protesters departed
peacefully on April 30th, having
gained widespread press attention
and public support.
Eventually, spurred by the
persistent demands of the Tent
City Task Force and the Tent
City Corporation, the Boston
Redevelopment Authority retreated
from its plan to build an above-
ground parking garage and
agreed to consider affordable
housing options for the site. On
April 30, 1988, exactly 20 years
after the protest ended and the
development work began, Mel
King and other activists celebrated
the opening of 269 units of mixed
income housing, known as Tent
City, on the same spot.
52
Newspapers often looked to MIT
for guidance on housing, as in the
captions accompanying the images
here. [above left] Cities should
contain neighborhoods, says Prof.
Adams of Tech, and they should be
constructed primarily for children.
[above right] Professors Adams
and Greeley....inspect proposed
model for a new Jeffries Point in
East Boston. Greeley explained that
big cities, such as Boston, should
try to capture the essence of small
and tranquil New England towns.
28
Charlie Abrams [left], who taught
in the Department primarily
during the 1950s and 1960s,
explored housing problems of
many kinds, both domestically and
internationally.
53
Several other faculty, including Lloyd Rodwin,
Bernard Frieden, Arthur Solomon, Langley Keyes,
Phillip Clay, Lawrence Vale, and Xavier de Souza
Briggs, wrote infuential books and professional
reports on many aspects of low-income housing in
the United States.
54
Langley Keyes
Community
South End
Rehabilitation
Department Head, 1974-1978
MIT was very gracious about letting young professors go off into the world and practice
what they had been preaching in the academy. In the fall of 1962, I planned to go to
law school. Fortunately, in retrospect, it didnt work out. Instead I went to work as a
community organizer in Bostons South End where the Boston Redevelopment Authority
was proposing ambitious neighborhood rehabilitation. I wrote my DUSP/MIT thesis about
planning in the South End and it became a book.
Now, forty years later, I am deeply embedded again in the community, this time as an
observer trying to make sense of the meaning of diversity over the life of a place which
has gone from being the despair of the city to one of its most desirable neighborhoods. In
a sense the South End represents the bookends of my career in the community. Revisiting
it is anything but dj vu all over again as the comparative pictures below of Montgomery
Park, in 1968 [right middle], and 2007 [right bottom], make clear.
55
Phillip Clay
Neighborhoods
National Policy
Urban renewal
Department Head, 1992-1994
MIT Chancellor, 2001-present
My Neighborhood Renewal book makes the distinction
between neighborhood reinvestment generated by
newcomers the so-called gentrifcation process and
reinvestment which is an incumbent upgrading, a function
of people in the neighborhood beginning to renew their
own investment in the neighborhood. A lot of what is
important in the whole process of neighborhood dynamics
and community change is really psychological.
In the early 1970s, I worked on a project with community
residents exploring how concepts of defensible space
(Oscar Newmans concept) could be incorporated in this
housing development in Lower Roxbury. The principles
[were] applied in this project, which survives to this
day as the core of a strong and viable community in a
former urban renewal area. Below left, the Madison Park
groundbreaking, and below right, the townhomes in 2006.
56
Tunney Lee
Implementation
Community input
Total Studio
Department Head, 1986-1990
Its about understanding institutions:
I mean, you go to a Harvard urban design
jury, you never hear any discussion as to
who is going to carry out this wonderful
thing weve just designed. Thats just of
no interest to them. In contrast, we would
have failed if we didnt inculcate in our
students the necessity for understanding
the institutional arrangements at the same
time as we talk about design.
29
57
Lawrence Vale
Reclaiming housing
Design politics
Resilience
Department Head, 2002-present
As a child in Chicago, my family always made a detour to avoid going past the nearby
Cabrini-Green housing project, so naturally I developed a fascination for public housing.
My subsequent writing has examined the specifc socio-political and design histories of
particular public housing communities, documenting the active struggles of residents,
their advocates, and their detractors.
In South Bostons West Broadway (D Street) project, redevelopment took more than
twenty years to complete, leaving many long-term residents to view the distant promise of
revitalization from desolate courts that lingered in neglect. [below center] Design decisions
and political processes also come together over questions of post-disaster recovery. I
think of the human resilience displayed by school children attending to their lessons amidst
the ruins of post-Bomb Hiroshima [below right] and it makes me more confdent about the
eventual recovery of post-Katrina New Orleans and Mississippi.
58
The commitment to environmental policy and planning in
the department is deeply rooted in earlier traditions of both
environmental design and public policy. Since the 1970s,
the department has helped planners to develop new ways
to address intractable environmental problems, focusing
on methods of alternative dispute resolution. Research
and practice activities have ranged broadly and globally:
brownfelds reclamation, international environmental
treaty negotiation, ecosystem management, environmental
movements, the role of natural systems in urban areas, and
the simulation of environmental futures.
In 1980, Prof. Lawrence Susskind launched a journal,
Environmental Impact Assessment Review. Susskind also
played a leading role in the establishment of the MIT-
Harvard Public Disputes Program, part of the inter-
university Program on Negotiation and, in 1993, founded
a highly infuential not-for-proft organization, the
Consensus Building Institute (CBI), which hired many
DUSP students and alums.
Since the 1990s, environmental policy and planning has
embraced a commitment to sustainable development,
environmental justice, and the appropriate use of science.
In 2004, the Department initiated the MIT-USGS Science
Impact Collaborative (MUSIC), a joint effort with the
United States Geological Survey and other federal agencies
to help sound environmental science better inform the
making of public policy. The Department established an
Environmental Planning Certifcate in 2007, confrming
the centrality of environmental issues in the coursework of
many DUSP students.
Environmental Policy
& Planning
Sustainability
Social movements
Science impact
10
59
[left] JoAnn Carmins research on
the societal dimensions of
environmental governance in
transition countries includes
studies of NGO and community
mobilization as in this protest in
the Czech Republic.
[below] Judy Layzers investigations
of developments effects on the
health of the natural environment
examine the effectiveness of
landscape-scale planning in
urbanizing areas across the US,
including the Florida Everglades
restoration.
60
Lawrence
Susskind
Can public disputes (land use & natural resource
management conficts) be mediated, and, if so, are the
results better than what we might otherwise expect?
Can the results of global environmental treaty making be
enhanced, from the standpoint of the poorest countries in the
world? Are there better ways of resolving science-intensive
policy disputes so that scientifc considerations are given
more weight? In the Negev, Bedouin have pressed their
land claims for decades. Through the Consensus Building
Institute (CBI), I work to help resolve these kinds of disputes.
For the next 5 years, I hope to stay focused on issues of
resource development on aboriginal lands.
Negotiation
Dispute resolution
Aboriginal lands
Dept. Head, 1978-1982
61
Anne Whiston
Spirn
Seeing is for me a way of knowing, and photography a
form of inquiry. After The Granite Garden in 1984, I began a
series of research projects on poverty, race, environmental
quality, and place, investigations that continue into the
present. The Language of Landscape emerged from my
process of seeing, photographing, and writing; places were
my primary sources, and photographs were primary data.
Daring to Look: Dorothea Langes Photographs and
Reports from the Field, my book of never-before-published
photographs and feld reports by Lange, reevaluates
her reputation and describes her camera as a tool of
research. I revisited the places Lange photographed
in 1939 in California, North Carolina, and the Pacifc
Northwest. Below is an irrigation project she documented
in Oregon [middle] and the project today [right], where I
met ditch riders and farmers who took farms out of the
sagebrush in the 1930s and learned of the challenges they
now face.
Seeing
Photography
Landscape
62
Dean William Porter founded the Schools Laboratory
of Architecture and Planning (LAP) in the 1970s to
encourage and support feld-related research. In addition
to many projects related to solar houses and building
technology, LAP director Michael Joroff convened scores
of professional education programs related to city
planning, facilities management, and workplace design,
hosted the Environmental Impact Assessment Review for
many years, and provided the initial home for the MIT-
Tsinghua Beijing Urban Design Studio, one of many other
activities based in East Asia that continue to this day.
In 1983, under the protective auspices of the LAP,
Dean Porter launched Places: A Quarterly Journal of
Environmental Design, a collaboration between the MIT
School of Architecture and Planning and the College
of Environmental Design at UC Berkeley. Porters
original Berkeley counterpart was to be Professor Donald
Appleyard, a plan cut short by a tragic car accident. Instead,
Berkeley Professor Donlyn Lyndon (former head of the
MIT Architecture Department) took the editorial helm for
the next 25 years.
Another of LAPs lasting contributions was to initiate the
frst in a series of Boston Conferences, led by Principal
Research Scientist Thomas Piper. In 1984, MIT co-
convened the initial Boston Conference with the Boston
Globe, bringing together developers, city offcials, architects
and planners to examine the citys historic and future
development. John de Monchaux opened the frst session
in a true Lynchian spirit: We think that a good city would
be one whose form is convenient, comfortable, attractive,
and inspiring.
30
Among other outcomes, the 1984
conference led to the redesign of Copley Square and to the
Boston Civic Design Commission.
The Laboratory of
Architecture & Planning
Boston conferences
East Asia
New journals
11
63
Boston conferences have been
held in 1984, 1994, 1998, and
2002. The 2002 conference,
Beyond the Big Dig, helped to
galvanize public action on the new
surface parcels reclaimed by the
burial of Bostons Central Artery.
FutureBoston, the 2008 edition
of the Boston Conference, seeks
to develop recommendations and
proposals for enhancing Bostons
competitive edge in an increasingly
globalized world, focusing on three
major areas: health, design, and
sustainability.
The journal started by MIT and
UC Berkeley is now called Places:
A Forum of Design for the Public
Realm, and continues to thrive as a
multi-university collaboration.
64
Gary Hack
Many of our students go into regulatory positions. They
often fnd that its their principal responsibility to stop
abuses, to stop water from being polluted. They may forget
that theres another side to the coin. What would you do
along a river if you fnally cleaned up the water? Our feld
has a social responsibility to be inventing things that are
better than we know about.
31
In the 1990s, we were engaged by a New York task force
to break a deadlock over how to replace the collapsed
West Side Highway and make the Manhattan waterfront
accessible. We concluded that less was truly more: a
waterfront boulevard, piers converted to recreation uses,
and a park extending 4 miles along the waterfront. Our
planning consisted of identifying the opportunities and
creating what was possible.
Collaboration
Waterfront planning
Institution-builder
Dept. Head, 1982-1986
65
Founded in 1983 through the leadership of DUSP faculty
members Gary Hack and Lawrence Bacow and the central
initiative of Charles H. (Hank) Spaulding, MITs Center
for Real Estate Development (CRED) was the frst such
center to be based in a school of architecture and planning.
Spaulding served a two-year term as the Centers inaugural
director, with Bacow as director for education and research.
The Master of Science in Real Estate Development
(MSCRED) degree program gained MIT Faculty approval
a scant six weeks before the January 1984 deadline for
applications, yet received 1,000 requests for materials
and 225 completed applications. 35 of 36 of those who
were accepted chose to come by far the highest yield on
admissions of any program at MIT. I was a bit concerned
given the timing of things that we were spending a lot
of money and time developing a terrifc program and
nobody would show up, Bacow noted a few months after
the program started. But I am delighted to say that this
was not the case.
32
In the early 1990s, responding to a
downturn in the real-estate market, the Center dropped the
word Development from its name, but CRE continued to
focus on both fnance and development issues. Today, the
Center for Real Estate has a thriving masters program, an
industry-relevant research program, and a global presence.
The Center for Real Estate
Urban economics
Finance
Development
12
66
[counterclockwise from top left]
- Former CRE Director Bill Wheaton;
- Founder Hank Spaulding and Director David Geltner;
- Chairman Tony Ciochetti in China;
- Hank Spaulding, Larry Bacow, and Mary Ann Taylor,
CREDs frst full-time employee in 1984, at the
opening of CREDs new space in MITs Armory.
- Group work at CRE, circa 2000
- Professor Larry Bacow with members of the CRE class
of 1992
CRED founder Hank Spaulding argued for a strong
relationship between developers and the university:
There is relatively little money spent on research in
our business; as compared to the medical, chemical,
and electronics business, and yet shelter is one of
the necessities of life. We need to give people more
technical and management skills to deal with complex
projects. The regulatory & environmental issues
need to be better understood by practitioners in the
development business.
33
67
[left] Affordable housing in the Greater Boston
Area, from the CRE & DUSP Housing Affordability
Initiative (HAI), a long-term commitment to focus the
considerable resources of MIT on housing affordability
issues.
[below] CRE Director David Geltner and former Director
Bill Wheaton have each co-authored major textbooks
in the feld. Bernie Frieden and Lynne Sagalyns work
examined the growth of public-private development
partnerships, and Henry Pollakowski has edited the
Journal of Housing Economics from his base at CRE.
68
The Department has been engaged in international
development scholarship and practice since at least the
1950s. From the early work of Adams, Howard, and
Greeley in India and Bangkok, through the ambitious
multi-dimensional adventure of planning Venezuelas
Ciudad Guayana, the Department has sought global
outreach and infuence. In 1967, Lloyd Rodwin launched
the Special Program for Urban and Regional Studies of
Developing Areas (SPURS), which has to date brought to
MIT more than 600 mid-career professionals from 90
different countries, including many Hubert Humphrey
Fellows. Always an attraction to international students, in
1984, the department formally added a specialized MCP
degree option for planners focused on developing areas.
Todays International Development Group (IDG) conducts
research and assists in the planning practice in countries
around the world striving for social, political, and economic
development. IDG faculty members examine the urban,
regional, and national socioeconomic impacts of major
public and/or private investments, and address problems
of squatter housing, municipal fnance, metropolitan
sprawl, and social disparities at a variety of scales. Aided
by a variety of Practica subjects and feld-based research
on several continents, DUSPs curriculum in international
development provides an integrated institutional and
historical view of economic, physical, political, and social
factors.
International Development
Political economy
Development policy
SPURS/Humphrey
13
69
[top] The 1969-70 SPURS group including among others Lisa Peattie, Lloyd Rodwin,
John F.C. Turner, William L. Porter, John Harris, and Ralph A. Gakenheimer.
[above] SPURS Director Bish Sanyal with the 2007-2008 SPURS & Humphrey Fellows
Sanyal observes: Changing circumstances require that we consider the mid-career
international fellows not as agents or technology transfers but as partners in the joint
production of knowledge. In a multi-polar world, our global network, not our military might,
will be the key to prosperity as well as peace.
70
[top left] John Friedmann, a distinguished urban planning theorist and educator, began his
career in MITs DCRP during the 1960s.
Since then, faculty have worked on every continent, including extensive scholarship by Diane
Davis in Mexico [bottom left], and analysis of the institutions and processes of development
by Balakrishnan Rajagopal.
[center right] Since 1992, Judith Tendler (below coconuts) has run fve projects with groups of
students in Brazil, a prize-winning combination of teaching and feld research.

[bottom center] Political economist Alice Amsden has authored noted books examining the
theoretical and institutional processes of late industrialization.
71
Bish Sanyal
Interconnections
Institutions
Developing nations
Department Head, 1994-2002
In writing Comparative Planning Cultures, I learned that
there is no cultural nucleus, no social gene that can be
decoded to reveal the cultural DNA of planning practice.
Planning culture, like the larger social culture in which it is
embedded is in constant fux, because of the continuous
process of social, political and technological changes....
Planning cultures should be viewed in this dynamic way,
in contrast to traditional notions of culture that are used
to evoke a sense of immutability and inheritance, so as to
go beyond cultural essentialism which, in essence, is an
exclusionary, parochial, and also inaccurate representation
of history.
72
Karen R. Polenske
Energy security
Regional disparity
Land recycling
Little did I realize during my frst feld trip to Shanxi Province (which produces 40% of
Chinese coke) that I was recording the beginning of a rapid transformation in cokemaking
technologies. This hole-in-the-ground indigenous oven site south of Jiexiu is the earliest
type of oven [above left] - most closed as of 2000. The workers put metallurgical coal into
the rectangular pit, covered it with straw, and set it afre, where it took 2 weeks to form coke.
Above right is a coke push at Taiyuan Iron Steel in 2000. Coke-pushing has made
cokemaking one of the top polluting industries in China. Some plants have installed covers
on their quenching cars, as efforts to reduce pollution. Now, clean coke ovens, where
gases, tar, and particulates are combusted inside the oven, are being installed in China. It
is an environmentally friendly technology, but is it contributing to a sustainable economy?
73
[left] Between 1958 and 1960,
the frm of Adams, Howard, and
Greeley helped develop a 30-year
land-use plan for Greater Bangkok.
Samuel Cullers, the departments
frst African-American graduate,
led the Bangkok-based team.
(The Thai year 2533, using
a Buddhist calendar, is the
equivalent to 1990.)
[left] In 1996, DUSP faculty again
assisted municipal offcials in
Bangkok with a new plan, this
time led by Gary Hack and Ralph
Gakenheimer.
74
The Department has emphasized feld-based learning
opportunities for many decades and, in 2002, formally
introduced a Practicum requirement into the MCP
curriculum. These workshop-style subjects provide
students with experience in the practice of city and regional
planning by providing the opportunity to synthesize
planning solutions within the constraints of real scenarios
faced by clients in locales ranging from Massachusetts to
Mexico to Mozambique. Each practicum seeks to place
students and faculty at the leading edge of planning
practice by exploring innovative ways to integrate planning
disciplines, to work with communities, apply refective
practice and connect theory and practice. These practica
share several characteristics: the making and testing of
proposals; the involvement of constituents in a particular
place; the deployment of interdisciplinary approaches
and team-teaching; the exploration of multiple methods
for addressing problems. During the frst six years of the
requirement, Practicum coordinator Karl Seidman oversaw
workshops covering all areas of the department, working in
settings that ranged from central cities and suburban areas
in the United States to urban, peri-urban and regional
areas in both developed and developing countries. In many
cases, the Department has established strong multi-year
partnerships with particular clients and communities.
Practica
Synthetic planning
Client orientation
Refective practice
14
75
Starting in 2004, Lorlene Hoyt,
assisted by Langley Keyes,
introduced a multi-year practicum
based in Lawrence, MA, one part
of the broader MIT@Lawrence
project, a HUD-funded Community
Outreach Partnership Center.
76
In 2005, students led by
Jennifer Davis spent a month in
Mozambique developing action
plans to improve water and
sanitation services to Maputos
poor.
77
[above] In 2006 & 2007, Diane Davis and Christopher Zegras conducted
practica in Mexico City with the NGO Metrpoli 2025 and a local university,
emphasizing metropolitanism from below, sustainability through
interventions that build on local community assets.
[below] In 2006 and 2008, Balakrishnan Rajagopal, founder of MITs
Program on Human Rights and Justice, led DUSP practica in the Indian
state of Gujarat, focusing on issues of Dalit rights and sanitation in the
effort to end caste-based manual scavenging of human waste.
78
In the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, which struck
the Gulf Coast of the United States in August 2005,
the Department embarked on a sustained and multi-
faceted engagement with New Orleans and surrounding
parishes. This has included long-term neighborhood
rebuilding efforts linked to a variety of DUSPs practicum
and economic development classes; affordable housing
initiatives aimed at achieving energy savings; capacity-
building of local not-for-proft organizations; community
organizing; planning and technical assistance support
to community-based, labor and governmental economic
development organizations; and environmental education
and remediation.
Several faculty members have worked to promote scholarly
and practitioner dialogue on a variety of rebuilding issues,
through publications and participation in a variety of
conferences. In the summer of 2007, the Department
organized more than a dozen MIT interns to work at the
New Orleans Offce of Recovery Management, more than
doubling the size of the staff. Since then, working through
DUSPs Community Innovators Lab (CoLab), students
and faculty worked to develop systematic ways to refect on
what they have been learning, have sought ways to deepen
the community engagement with local organizations, and
endeavored to nurture local capacity for comprehensive
participatory neighborhood rebuilding.
DUSP in New Orleans
Recovery management
Capacity-building
Implementation
15
79
MIT students worked with several ORM department
heads, including Alvin Harrison, director of Population
and Resettlement [standing upper left]. DUSPs Phil
Thompson [upper right, with three students] led a
2006 Practicum based in the Trem neighborhood and
inspired many of the Departments activities in the city.
Students saw frst-hand the devastation caused by
failed canals and levees.
80
[left] MITs ORM interns proposed
6 projects for NOLAs 17 Targeted
Recovery Areas, focusing on
New Orleans East Plaza, Harrison
Avenue, South Claiborne &
Toledano, North Claiborne & St.
Bernard, Gentilly & Elysian Fields,
and Broad & Laftte.
[below] As part of the Main Streets
practicum, DUSP students worked
with a citizens group to produce
designs for the Laftte Greenway,
a 3.1 mile linear park for bikes and
pedestrians that was written into
the Recovery Plan as one of ORMs
frst priority projects.
81
DUSP in China
Since the 1980s, faculty and students from DUSP have
become increasingly engaged with all facets of Chinas
urbanization. In 1984, MIT launched the biannual
Beijing Urban Design Studio, an ongoing series of
summertime partnerships bringing together faculty
and students from MIT and Tsinghua University, led
on the MIT side in most years by Dennis Frenchman and
Jan Wampler. Other long-term engagements with China
have included the Beijing Urbanization Lab, research on
Chinas energy use and land recycling, and studios based
in the Pearl River Delta that have explored innovative
approaches to housing and environmental sustainability.
In 2003, at the initiative of DUSP graduate students from
China, the newly founded China Planning Network (CPN)
embarked on an ambitious series of conferences aimed at
improving the dialogue between Chinese policymakers and
a wide variety of scholars and practitioners in the West.
Following two small conferences held in Cambridge during
2004 and 2005, in 2006 CPN held its conference in
Beijing, co-sponsored by Chinas Ministry of Construction,
and attracted more than 1,000 participants. To coincide
with this, DUSPs peer-reviewed journal Projections
featured an issue on Planning in China. In 2007, CPN
held another successful conference in Beijing, this time
focused on addressing Chinas transportation challenges.
That same year, the Chinese journal Urban Planning
Overseas devoted an entire issue to the research of DUSP
faculty, including Chinese translations of 14 recent articles
showcasing all areas of the Department.
Beijing studios
CPN
Urbanization Lab
16
82
Since 1984, about 200 students
from the School of Architecture
and Planning have spent summers
working with 200 of their Chinese
counterparts in Beijing, while also
taking time for study tours of such
places as Shanghai, Suzhou, and
Shanxi province.
83
In June 2006, DUSPs presence
in China coalesced with the CPN
Beijing Conference and the signing
ceremony to inaugurate the Beijing
Urbanization Lab. Publications
included DUSP faculty essays in
Urban Planning Overseas and
printed conference proceedings.
84
[left] In 2006, the Beijing City
Planning Exhibition Center,
adjacent to Tiananmen Square,
hosted a major retrospective show
highlighting the contributions of
the frst twenty years of the MIT-
Tsinghua Urban Design Studio.
[below] Student work from the
2006 studio included these
proposals for a transportation
center.
85
Technologies & Cities
MITs course in city planning embraced the advantages of
its embeddedness in an Institute of Technology right from
the start. In 1951, Kevin Lynch urged his colleagues to
launch a research center that would lean heavily toward
the infuence of technology on metropolitan form. He
presciently called for expanding the departments agenda
to include the role of communication and transportation
in the urban environment and to be open to new
possibilities of recently developed technical means and
theories.
34
Led by Prof. Aaron Fleisher, the department
was a pioneer in introducing computers to the teaching
of city planning, in 1961. Fleisher, initially trained as a
meteorologist, developed a series of computer experiments
dealing with urban form, transportation networks, location
choices, and travel paths. He also led the way in developing
computational methods for handling urban information
systems, joined in this work by mathematical sociologist
Prof. James Beshers. The Department embraced the
personal computer during the 1980s. By the 1990s, Prof.
Joe Ferreiras Planning Support Systems group made
extensive use of Geographic Information Systems (GIS)
software, both as a pedagogical necessity and as a tool
for research. In 2004, Carlo Ratti opened the SENSEable
City Lab, part of a growing initiative to use information
technology to make cities more responsive.
Computational methods
Urban Information Systems
Responsive Cities
17
86
[left] The SENSEable City Labs
Real Time Rome project, exhibited
at the 2006 Venice Biennale, uses
data from cell phone locations to
produce innovative maps of the city
and its use.
[below] In Zaragoza, Spains
Digital Mile, Dennis Frenchman,
William Mitchell, Carlo Ratti
and their teams have explored
innovative ways to use digital
media to enhance the experience
of the public realm.
87
[left] Professor Aaron Fleisher
[right] Labor economist Frank
Levys work has explored how
computers have changed the
nature of the job market and the
skills needed to prosper.
Joe Ferreira [above left] who helped develop MITs
Project Athena in the 1980s, led the Planning Support
Systems group and Computer Resources Laboratory
(CRL) through the 1990s, pioneering new directions in
Geographic Information Systems. At right, an example
of CRL work.
88
Changing Cities:
Is there a DUSP way?
After 75 years, the Departments faculty, students, and
alums remain committed to fnding new ways to make a
difference in the world. Four questions serve as ways to
organize DUSPs responses to this challenge.
Can we design better cities?
Can we help places grow sustainably?
Can we help communities thrive?
Can we help advance equitable world development?
In 1992, a committee chaired by Donald Schn released
the Departments long-range plan, intended to chart the
future of DUSP over the next 10 to 15 years. That plan
provided the structure of program groups and research
clusters that has prevailed since that time. Now, however,
DUSP has reached the end of that planning period,
and must look forward to future changes. Some things,
however, have remained remarkably constant:
DUSP has taken an expansive view of planning and
planners, which has both forged new opportunities
and challenged DUSPs collective identity as a single
Department;
DUSP has stayed focused on getting things done in the
world, not just having ideas;
DUSP has retained a deep interest in the politics and
institutional processes that shape ideas and make it
possible act on them democratically;
Planning
Urban Studies
Change
18
89
DUSP fosters a positive approach to technological transformation as a major force of
social change;
DUSP trusts that the built environment can meet the needs of diverse populations and
serve as a source of meaning in their daily lives:
DUSPs appetite for global and comparative thinking and doing continues to grow;
DUSP remains committed to the disadvantaged, to helping them develop and use their
own voices and skills to make empowered decisions.
Taken together, these shared premises and practices reveal DUSPs moral vision for
professional education, engaged scholarship, and public action.
Changing the city-regions of an imperiled planet urgently requires all this, and more.
90
A Growing Department
Rooted in the land-use planning traditions of the 1930s, over its frst 75 years MITs
program in City Planning has pioneered new ways to analyze and enhance the physical
form of cities, embraced the social sciences, expanded into studies of comparative
planning and development practice around the world, and developed novel ways to
negotiate effective action, nurture supportive technologies, and encourage refective
practice. Always, MIT faculty and alums have consistently sought to lead the planning
profession, challenge its boundaries, and expand its reach.
91
92
Mexico
Cuba
Haiti
Jamaica
Venezuela
Panama
Colombia
Ecuador
Peru
Bolivia
Chile
Paraguay
Brazil
Uruguay
Argentina
Costa Rica
Nicaragua
El Salvador
Honduras
Guatemala
Dominican Republic Puerto Rico
Ireland
Spain
Switzerland
Italy
Austria
Czech Republic
Slovakia Moldova
Romania
Ukraine
Lithuania
Belarus
Latvia
Estonia
Finland
Russia
Norway
Sweden
Denmark
Poland
Croatia
Slovenia
Hungary
Bulgaria
Serbia
Bosnia
Albania
Greece
Turkey
Georgia
Armenia
Turkmenistan
Afghanistan
Uzbekistan
Kazakhstan
Kyrgyzstan
Tajikistan
India
Pakistan
Bangladesh
Sri Lanka
China Nepal
Mongolia
Democratic Peoples
Republic of Korea
South Korea
Vietnam
Philippines
Japan
Indonesia
Papua New Guinea
Australia
New Zealand
Cambodia
Malaysia
Singapore
Laos
Thailand
Myanmar
Azerbaijan
Iran
Iraq
Kuwait
United Arab Emirates
Saudi Arabia
Syria
Lebanon
Israel
Occupied
Palestinian Territory
Egypt
Algeria
Tunisia
Morocco
Niger
Chad
Central African Republic
Uganda
Nigeria
Burkina Faso
Mauritania
Mali
Senegal
Gambia
Ivory Coast Guinea Bissau
Guinea
Sierra Leone
Liberia
Ghana
Togo
Benin
Cameroon
Gabon
Democratic Republic
of the Congo
Zambia
Congo
Kenya
Rwanda
Burundi
Ethiopia
Somalia
Eritrea
Tanzania
Zimbabwe
Namibia
Angola
Botswana
Mozambique
Malawi
Madagascar
Mauritius
South Africa
Libya
Sudan
Jordan
Yemen
Oman
Macedonia
Portugal
Great Britain
France
Belgium
Netherlands
Germany
United States of America
Canada
12
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1.6
16
13
4.0
7.6
2.0
0.9
4.2
10
22
5.2
2.7
2.5
2.6 0.8
4.9
2.4
9.3
7.4 1.1
29
5.3
33
3.2
0.9
6.8
7
1.9
0.2
0.3
0.1
1.1
1
1.8
5.6
1.5
1.4
6.6
5.4
2.6
40
5.5
26
2.1
114
18
3.5
0.9
17
22
18
4.4
23
3.1
1.3
55
2.8
3.4
1
0.4
0.1
5.4
1.2
14
39
85
1.5
4.8
38
3.2
7.8
4.4
1.9
2.3
1.9
8.6
10
2.4
1.6
51
5.2
10
5
21
6.2
1.9
3.7
2.7
20
48
60
An Urbanized and Urbanizing Planet
The urbanizing world is shown
here as the total urban population
of world countries in 1950 (inner
circle) and projected for 2010
(outer circle.) The difference in
area between the nested circles
represents the total increase in
urbanized population during this
period. Intensity of color reveals
the proportion of the entire
national population living in cities,
with the palest shades depicting
more rural places and the darkest
shades highlighting the most
urbanized.
Data from the World Population Database
2006. Copyright United Nations 2007. Source
http://esa.un.org/unpp.
Key
Proportion of population living
in cities: Colors represent
quartile ranges for percentage of
urbanization within each countrys
population. 1950 and 2010 are
calculated independently.
8
26
2010 urban population
(millions)
Highest proportion
of population living
in cities
Lowest proportion
of population living
in cities
1950 urban population
(millions)
93
Mexico
Cuba
Haiti
Jamaica
Venezuela
Panama
Colombia
Ecuador
Peru
Bolivia
Chile
Paraguay
Brazil
Uruguay
Argentina
Costa Rica
Nicaragua
El Salvador
Honduras
Guatemala
Dominican Republic Puerto Rico
Ireland
Spain
Switzerland
Italy
Austria
Czech Republic
Slovakia Moldova
Romania
Ukraine
Lithuania
Belarus
Latvia
Estonia
Finland
Russia
Norway
Sweden
Denmark
Poland
Croatia
Slovenia
Hungary
Bulgaria
Serbia
Bosnia
Albania
Greece
Turkey
Georgia
Armenia
Turkmenistan
Afghanistan
Uzbekistan
Kazakhstan
Kyrgyzstan
Tajikistan
India
Pakistan
Bangladesh
Sri Lanka
China Nepal
Mongolia
Democratic Peoples
Republic of Korea
South Korea
Vietnam
Philippines
Japan
Indonesia
Papua New Guinea
Australia
New Zealand
Cambodia
Malaysia
Singapore
Laos
Thailand
Myanmar
Azerbaijan
Iran
Iraq
Kuwait
United Arab Emirates
Saudi Arabia
Syria
Lebanon
Israel
Occupied
Palestinian Territory
Egypt
Algeria
Tunisia
Morocco
Niger
Chad
Central African Republic
Uganda
Nigeria
Burkina Faso
Mauritania
Mali
Senegal
Gambia
Ivory Coast Guinea Bissau
Guinea
Sierra Leone
Liberia
Ghana
Togo
Benin
Cameroon
Gabon
Democratic Republic
of the Congo
Zambia
Congo
Kenya
Rwanda
Burundi
Ethiopia
Somalia
Eritrea
Tanzania
Zimbabwe
Namibia
Angola
Botswana
Mozambique
Malawi
Madagascar
Mauritius
South Africa
Libya
Sudan
Jordan
Yemen
Oman
Macedonia
Portugal
Great Britain
France
Belgium
Netherlands
Germany
United States of America
Canada
12
3.3
20
5
329
5
8
101 101
0.8
0.3
0.7
0.5
0.3
0.3
2.4
1
3.1
0.9
3.6
0.5
1.7
11
40
54
1
2.6
23
47
15
34
3
6.3
2
3.7
5
7.6
3
4.7
6
13
8
10
44
62
1
3.2
0.5
0.9
0.9
1.6
2
7
0.7
2.2
13
31
2.6
6.3
4.5
5.4
3.7
7.4
1
3
4.9
6.7
4.2
12
0.4
2
0.4 0.6 1
0.3
0.2 0.2
0.1
2.1
3.3 3.3
0.1
0.8
0.3
0.1
0.1
0.1
3.9
2.3
0.2
<0.1
0.3
<0.1
0.4
0.4
0.1
0.2
0.2
0.6 0.8
0.1
0.3
<0.1
<0.1
0.3
0.1
0.1
2.3
0.3
0.1
0.3
0.1
0.3
0.2
<0.1
5.8
0.3
2
0.3
0.4
2.1
0.3
0.3
2.8
0.9
0.9
6.4
0.4
2.8
<0.1
6.3
1.4
9.9
3.2
3
4
29
0.2
0.2
1.8
1.1
0.5
1.2
0.6
1.3
4.7
0.5
2.4
2
0.1
0.5
0.3
1.1
0.2
0.7
0.3
<0.1
<0.1
0.1
1.9
6.5
5.3
0.9
0.1
0.5
84
6.3
3.5
4.3
3.4
2.8
2.4
8.5
3.5
6.2 3.9
1.5
34
26
8.7
21
6.2
163
15 3.8
3.2
36
246 246
26
2.4
11
8.6
0.5
2.7
3.7
69
19
2.7
1.3
4.6
0.9
5.1
9.5
1.2
20
1.6
16
13
4.0
7.6
2.0
0.9
4.2
10
22
5.2
2.7
2.5
2.6 0.8
4.9
2.4
9.3
7.4 1.1
29
5.3
33
3.2
0.9
6.8
7
1.9
0.2
0.3
0.1
1.1
1
1.8
5.6
1.5
1.4
6.6
5.4
2.6
40
5.5
26
2.1
114
18
3.5
0.9
17
22
18
4.4
23
3.1
1.3
55
2.8
3.4
1
0.4
0.1
5.4
1.2
14
39
85
1.5
4.8
38
3.2
7.8
4.4
1.9
2.3
1.9
8.6
10
2.4
1.6
51
5.2
10
5
21
6.2
1.9
3.7
2.7
20
48
60
94
Section A. History
1
In 1933, DUSP began its life as an undergraduate division
in the School of Architecture. The fve year course
awarding a BA in City Planning was joined in 1935 by a
graduate program leading to an MCP. That programs
philosophy was clear.
The curriculum is based on the recognition of the
fact that the solutions of all planning problems-
whether of city, region, or state-depend on the
proper coordination of all the factors involved-
not only those in the felds of architecture and
engineering but also the economic, sociological,
and governmental factors.
Oh for the certainty of solutions of all planning problems!
The MIT program remained largely a one-man band led by
Fred Adams until well into the 1940s. With reorganization
and renaming, the Department of City and Regional
Planning emerged in 1947 with Adams at its head.
Familiar names now begin to appear. Lloyd Rodwin joined
the faculty in 1946 and Kevin Lynch in 1948. By 1950,
the Department had expanded to six full-time faculty and
one visiting professor. Thus it remained for a decade with
Jack Howard, a consummate professional comprehensive
planner, taking over the leadership in 1957, a position he
held until 1970 when Rodwin succeeded him.
Issues of curriculum were simple in the Adams-Howard
days. At the start of the 1950s, fourteen subjects were
required of all professional degree candidates. Three
1 Avid readers can fnd a far more extensive version in the 1992 Long
Range Plan.
Appendix I: Here We Go Again:
Recurring Questions Facing DUSP
February 8, 2007
Langley Keyes
Lorlene Hoyt
Anne Whiston Spirn
Lawrence Susskind
95
required studio/workshops constituted the heart of the program. They focused on
preparing plans - mostly subdivisions - for communities in Metropolitan Boston.
Graduates were expected to join local planning commissions in Boston and elsewhere.
Those with memories of the 1950s in the Department of City and Regional Planning at
MIT debate what the decades program signifed. Some argue that the 50s were a period
of mindless exercising of outdated skills, simply a prelude for the change of the 60s.
Others maintain that Lynch, Rodwin, Frieden (the Departments frst Ph.D.) and others
represented prototypes of the new felds of work that would divide and multiply later.
Benchmarks in the l950s include: the dropping of the undergraduate program in l954,
creation of a doctoral program in 1958; a Center for Urban and Regional Studies set up
in 1958 under Lloyd Rodwins direction greatly enhanced the Departments research
potential.
From the vantage point of 2007 what is now the MIT Department of Urban Studies and
Planning (renamed in 1969) has been in a long transformation since the early sixties
when Jack Howard ruled a small, focused department of city planning faculty and students
with a benign but frm hand. The intellectual and professional life of the Department
was framed in those days by the physical components of the urban environment. Good
practice consisted of learning and implementing the rules-of-thumb derived from several
generations of experts centered in the rational tradition of city planning. Students were
taught about the evils of disjointed incrementalism. The limits of the feld were succinctly
expressed by Jack Howards oft-quoted declaration that our comprehensiveness is limited
by our comprehension.
2
At the same time, the design tradition was alive and well in Kevin Lynchs increasingly
infuential Image of the City work. The planner as master-builder, a combination of Daniel
Burnham and Robert Moses, could be found in Lloyd Rodwins Ciudad Guyana project
which nurtured, in more ways than one, a whole generation of urban professionals in the
1960s.
But the times they were a-changin. The intellectual clarity provided by 701 Master Plans,
the federal governments life-line to comprehensive planners, and regional transportation
studies -Dreaming the Rational City - was shattered with protests against urban renewal
and highway invasion, the advent of the Civil Rights Movement, the emergence of the War
on Poverty and later in the decade the rise of the environmental movement.
2 Those dying to know more about the planning traditions can do so by dredging up the Planning and
Institutional Processes (Gateways sire) course that Schn and Keyes taught in the early 1980s.
96
By the end of the 1960s the fourteen required courses had been blown away and the MCP
had virtually no requirements.
As he took over the mantle of leadership of the Department in 1970, aided by the youthful
Lawrence Susskind, Rodwin moved away with a vengeance from the comprehensive
physical planning tradition. With a keen sense of history, ideas and fnancial resources
in good currency, Lloyd transformed the Department, virtually overnight, into a bustling
academic supermarket in which one could acquire expertise in urban studies and social
science as well as professional practice. If Jack had been concerned to maintain the
professions boundaries, Lloyd was determined to push them out as far as his imagination,
energy and political skills could travel. In 1967 Lloyd received funding from the Ford
Foundation to initiate SPURS. In 1970 the Department got permission to run a small
scale S.B. in urban studies and to offer a fve year S.B./MCP. In 1971 the foundation
of what would become Mel Kings Community Fellows Program was put in place:
undergraduates, professionals from overseas, and frontline minority leaders broadened
the Departments terrain.
Lang Keyes wrote the following in 1991 for the Schn Long Range Planning document.
We think it has applies equally today.
In a sense the department has been working to absorb and adapt to Lloyds vision
since he left offce in 1974. DUSP as a supermarket was not a sustainable concept
in an era of diminishing resources in which the word urban became less
interesting to funders and donors. As the sixties-and seventies-idealism turned
down and the reform era with it, MIT undergraduates no longer looked to the
planning profession in large numbers as the calling for their multiple talents.
As we have struggled with the variety of faculty, courses, agendas and missions
resulting from the Rodwin offensive, we have been striving in however
unconscious a mode to arrive at the sense of purpose and place which has the
certainty of mission that characterized Jacks day combined with the intellectual
excitement and relevance that permeated the Department in Lloyds time. This
has been no easy task.
Major departmental reform efforts were undertaken in 1974, core reform in 1983. In 1992
the last major long-range plan for the department emerged under Don Schns leadership
after months of discussion, negotiation, memo writing and - yes - refection. The extensive
recommendations, many of which have been implemented, set the intellectual and
97
institutional framework for the Department as it exists today. It is a comprehensive,
compelling and thoughtful document and for those who are not familiar with it, worth
reading. Todays program groups have their origins in that plan of 1992 when the issue
was one of creating a fnite number of silos, not cutting across them.
The Schn regime, while dramatic in impact, was short-lived as was the Clay era that
followed. The last ffteen years have been blessed with strong and durable leadership,
frst under Bish Sanyal and then Larry Vale - what one might refer to as The Reign of the
DUSP Antonines.
3

Section B. From History to Critical Questions
The above is a short - very short - more or less linear history of the DUSP. Another way
to look at departmental history is to focus on a series of critical questions that keep
resurfacing, are resolved in some way or continue as a source of debate and concern.
Taking a long view of the Department, there has been serious attention paid to Ricks
command in Casablanca to Play it again (and again) Sam.
The following highlights briefy a list of Critical Questions that the Department has
confronted, resolved and faced again. While they have been reframed slightly each time
they have emerged, they are likely to re-emerge in roughly the same form in the future.
1. Shouldnt we be guided by a long-term vision of where the Department is headed?
Anyone viewing our activities over the past forty years would note various strands of the
deep mission that engaged us initially the late 1960s and continues to run through
many of the things that we do. The reformist tradition of taking concerted action to
improve the quality of life in spaces and places, especially when issues of equity are at
stake, speaks to most of the students who have entered our Masters program over the past
four decades.
In 1984 the DUSP Handbook defned our role as follows:
City and Regional Planners are involved in a variety of activities aimed at shaping
the patterns of human settlements. They work to provide housing, public services,
employment opportunities and other crucial support systems which comprise
a decent living environment, but also desire to harness the social, political,
economic and technological forces that give meaning to everyday life. Whether
the planner works at the neighborhood, metropolitan, state or national level, and
whether he or she works in the public or private sector, the tasks are essentially
3 Edward Gibbon (The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire) considers the Reign of the Antonines, 98-192 AD,
the height of the Roman Empire. Peace and prosperity ruled the land. It did not, however, last forever.
98
the same: to help defne goals and objectives, to develop programs and policies
responsive to individual and group needs, and to work with communities in
allocating their resources most effciently and equitably.
Planners are often described as generalists with a specialty. Specialties have
been thought of in functional terms (such as housing, transportation, land
use, etc.) or in terms of geographical levels at which decision-making takes
place (neighborhood planning, town planning, regional planning, planning for
international development, etc.). Specialties within the planning feld relate to
the different roles that planners play: manager, designer, regulator, advocate,
evaluator, mediator, futurist, etc.
4
In 1990, after extensive discussion, the following mission statement entered the DUSP
Handbook. It offered four key values.
First, the faculty is committed to taking action in the world. This is not to suggest
that knowledge and scholarship for their own sakes are not important. Rather,
the faculty places premium on generating useful knowledge and employing that
knowledge in ways that are aimed at repairing the world.
Secondly, the faculty shares a commitment to social and political reform. While
there may not be complete agreement on a reformist agenda, there is a distinctly
progressive cast to the goals of DUSP interventions, including a desire for more
democracy, respect for cultural diversity, the importance of informed public
discourse, increasing economic opportunities for the poor, the disadvantaged,
and the inarticulate and a concern that the advantages of material progress be
distributed fairly.
Third, the faculty agrees on the importance of improving the quality of places and
spaces. The physical environment and the form that settlements take are of great
concern.
Finally, the faculty has a great concern with making institutions work. That is,
faculty are interested in the design and management of institutions so that they ft
communities and environments effectively.
4 Larry Susskind taught a Planning and Institutional Processes course organized around the roles planners
play in the late 1970s.
99
This mission statement dropped out of the handbook in 1996 and has remained out ever
since. It was replaced with the following:
The Department of Urban Studies and Planning at MIT seeks to educate
practitioners and scholars who will be able to affect urban and regional
development, community and economic development, physical planning and
design and environmental policy. The Department is committed to educating
planners who can effectively advocate the interests of under-represented
constituencies.
However, the mission statement expressed in the 1992 Plan was re-affrmed during the
2000-2001 strategic planning process, and the ringing rhetoric of 1990 survives on our
website and in our new brochure, Can You Make a Difference in the World? The frst
thing that anyone opening the brochure will see is:
At the MIT Department of Urban Studies and Planning (DUSP), we are
committed to positive social change. Our moral vision is translated into
professional education in distinct ways:
We believe in the abilities of urban and regional institutions to steadily improve
the quality of life of citizens.
We emphasize democratic decision-making involving both public and private
actors, and acknowledge the necessity of government leadership to ensure greater
social and economic equality.
We foster a positive approach to technological innovation as a major force of
social change.
We trust that the built environment can meet the needs of diverse populations
and serve as a source of meaning in their daily lives.
The vision or educational mission of the Department will always be an important
consideration. It may be time to revisit the vision that will guide us for the next several
decades.
2. To what extent should a focus on places and spaces dominate our teaching, research
and practice as compared to a focus on policy and non-spatial concerns?
Other well-known planning schools, like Harvard, rejected their historical ties to
the design professions. They moved out of architecture/design schools into public
administration or public policy schools and immediately lost their professional identity.
For four decades we have worked to maintain our ties (primarily through city design
and development) to the architecture school in which we have been located from the
beginning, while simultaneously broadening and deepening our ties to applied social
100
science departments (like economics, political science, anthropology and sociology).
We have also tried hard to maintain a balance between a place-oriented approach to
problem-defnition and problem-solving and a policy-oriented approach to diagnosing and
analyzing more fundamental social ills. We have never bought into physical determinism
(i.e., that improving the design of the built environment will ensure social well-being).
At the same time, our teaching and research, inspired particularly by the work of Kevin
Lynch, has always focused on the importance of place-based problem solving.
There has also been a related tension between planning as a generic human activity
and planning as a process uniquely focused on place-making and the allocation of land
uses. One of the reasons we have never been able to link more closely to the Sloan School
of Management has been our unwillingness to peel back all the social and political
dimensions of place-based planning and focus solely on generic planning activities.
3. To what extent should our emphasis be on theory-building (knowledge development)
versus the education of practitioners? How do the two complement rather than compete
for attention and resources?
Given the critical nature of this issue, some background is in order.
A longstanding and common criticism of planning education is the persistent gap
between theoretical and applied modes of instruction. From the 1930s through the 1960s,
the planning curriculum at universities like MIT, Harvard, Penn and others emphasized
planning practice above theory (as evidenced by the curriculum, especially the volume of
studio courses offered during this time).
Between 1960 and 1970 many schools of planning, including MITs, experienced growing
tensions between theory and practice. This tension is not unique to planning schools;
most professional schools in the academic world struggle with it.
Throughout the 1970s and 1980s, the divide in planning schools deepened, as the
curriculum of most diverged from a focus on professional practice to a more theoretical
orientation. (In 1968, MIT planning department eliminated its core curriculum, which
included a series of studios; the set of core subjects put in place by the mid-1980s did not
require studio courses). One could argue that this move accentuated the departments
movement away from practice-based instruction.
This trend continued in planning schools across the country, despite the cohort of
educators who argued for the value of engaging students in professional settings to
prepare them for the day-to-day reality of planning practice. A movement to bridge the
theory-practice divide is apparent in the contemporary literature on planning pedagogy.
101
Our doctoral program has never been an advanced practitioners degree (although that
is what the Ph.D. in planning has been at many schools). Rather, our focus has been on
training scholars who will have the knowledge and skills required to make a contribution
to applied social theory and to earn tenure as academics at the most prestigious
universities. While some of our doctoral students do not choose an academic career,
we train all our Ph.D. candidates as if that were likely to be their goal. We have moved
from a departmental focused almost entirely on practice (in the 1950s and 1960s) to a
department focused much more heavily on traditional social science-style scholarship
(and humanities-style scholarship to a lesser degree). Scholarly success has become
the yardstick for faculty hiring and promotion more than innovative or noteworthy
contributions to practice. Even our MCP students, whom we expect to be practitioners
(rather than social theorists) are required to master analytical skills and a knowledge base
that has very little to do with many of the responsibilities they will be expected to handle as
advanced practitioners.
Do we need to rethink the balance that we currently maintain between theory-building and
practice in what we teach, in the focus of our research, and in how we reward student and
faculty performance?
4. To what extent should we maintain our specialized organizational structure (built
around four areas or groups) or should we give higher priority to cross-cutting activities
and problems?
For more than twenty years we have maintained a commitment to City Design and
Development, Environmental Policy and Planning; Housing and Community Economic
Development; and International Development (as well as cross-cutting initiatives in
transportation, information technology, and regional planning). Why? Are we convinced
that these are the most important sub-specializations within the planning feld? If they are,
will they always be? On what basis should we decide that certain specializations should
provide a basis for organizing our teaching and our research?
For the past few years, we have tried a number of ways to break down the divisions in
the Department, encouraging students (and faculty) to think in terms of multiple group
memberships and to engage in collaborative teaching. Nevertheless, we still allocate
lines for new faculty appointments, fnancial aid, admission slots, and even offce space
by the same four long-standing sub-specialties. Historically, sub-groups ensured that
students would be able to count on continuity in course offerings and fnd clusters of
students and faculty who formed a community of shared concern. One rationale for these
program groups has been that without pre-organized groups linked to the demand for
specialties in the market, we would have a hard time attracting applicants and maintaining
sustained research commitments.
102
At various times we have explored and rejected other possible specializations like health
planning, criminal justice planning, geography, education planning, land use law, and
others. But, we have not rejected the logic of maintaining some set of specializations.
Perhaps we should revisit the basis for selecting and maintaining our commitment to
specifc specializations.
5. What is the core knowledge that every graduate of our MCP Program needs to know?
(And, on what basis should materials be added to or deleted from this list?)
The key elements of he MCP core have changed markedly over the past forty years. In
the 1960s, the core was eliminated entirely and we decided to let 1,000 fowers bloom.
In 1974, we re-instituted the core in a new form. In 1982, we revised it substantially. In
1992, we reviewed the entire core yet again and renewed our commitment to certain key
elements. In 2001, following a lengthy strategic planning process, we revised the core one
more time. Are we still committed to one body of core knowledge for all MCP students
regardless of the specialization they choose or the career path they have in mind? Are we
as clear as we could be about what that body of knowledge ought to be?
6. What does it mean to be a planning department at MIT in particular? Do we have an
obligation and/or is it in our best interest to leverage our ties to the rest of MIT and build
on MITs unique strengths?
We have engaged in what seems like an endless struggle to bridge to the vital center of
what is, for many of us, a foreign culture. MIT has, for decades, been characterized as an
institution of higher learning polarized around science and engineering. Where does
that leave us? The way scientists and engineers think about their mission, gauge their
success, and organize themselves to do research and teaching often runs in different
directions from what we might otherwise choose. On the other hand, we beneft (at
least in terms of drawing the attention of national and international applicants) from
MITs reputation as a center for technical excellence. We have also worked hard to help
strengthen those aspects of MIT to which we can contribute. For example, we have played
a key role in developing the new Public Policy minor and offer a disproportionate number
of HASS courses to undergraduates.
In recent years, we have drawn on MITs strength in information science and built the
Computer Resource Network and attempted to build a cross-cutting Responsive Cities
initiative, bringing together faculty and students from across the DUSP program groups.
We are connected to MITs Media Lab, and have enhanced our course offerings in
visualization, modeling, geographic information systems, and strategies for managing
large data sets. We have also, through Joe Ferreira and others, helped to build MITs
computer-based and web-based learning systems on campus.
103
There are undoubtedly many ways in which we could do more to take advantage of
strengths in other MIT schools, departments and research centers if faculty were inclined
and/or rewarded for doing so. Similarly, MIT has not fully exploited what we have to
offer.
7. What more can we do to increase the volume of sponsored research that DUSP faculty
bring in each year?
The Institute rewards departments that generate substantial overhead on funded
research. Space (and money for space improvement) is allocated, in part, in response to
the volume of sponsored research. Departmental budgets (including money for student
aid) are allocated with at least a nod in the direction of sponsored research volumes.
DUSP has lagged behind other departments in the science and engineering schools in
generating sponsored research. We point to lots of reasons why we think this is true. For
example, there are no steady streams of federal money set aside to support research in
our feld the way there are in the biomedical, electrical engineering, artifcial intelligence
and other felds. NSF, NIH and other federal research programs do not award young
investigator grants for junior faculty in our feld. Much of the research we do is supported
by philanthropic and governmental sources that refuse to pay MITs overhead, more than
65% on every research dollar.
Nevertheless, the research traditions of most of our facultywho do not work in large
teams or with large data sets-- put us at a substantial fnancial disadvantage. We need
to constantly revisit possible ways in which we can increase the volume of sponsored
research credited to DUSP faculty.
8. Is it true that junior faculty in the DUSP have a smaller chance of earning tenure than
their predecessors? Are we valuing the right kinds of accomplishments when we make
tenure decisions?
It is true that over past decades a number of junior faculty members in DUSP have been
turned down for tenure or believed that they would be and left accordingly. Similarly, as
of 2007, the Department had yet to have a single female faculty member make it from
Assistant Professor to tenure, and progress for advancing under-represented minority
faculty has also lagged. We have, however, recently had outstanding and encouraging
success. It may be that the Department, at various points in the past, did not provide
adequate mentoring or clear enough guidelines about what was expected for promotion
and tenure. That no longer seems to be the case, but the level of anxiety experienced by
those who have to commit seven years of full-time service before they know whether they
can stay (for life) or must leave, remains considerably high. Furthermore, as a professional
school, we are still searching for the right way to ensure tenure for at least some tenure
track faculty members whose primary accomplishments are practice-related.
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The Engineering School and the Architecture Departments share some of these
diffculties. Whether the tenure hurdle is higher than it has been in the past or not, the
Department needs to continue to fnd ways of ensuring tenure success for our junior
faculty.
9. How can we continue to infuence the feld of planning in the United States and rest of
the world if the faculty are not themselves engaged in (exemplary) practice?
DUSP has had a disproportionate impact on the development of the academic wing of
the profession through the involvement of numerous MIT faculty members (including
previous DUSP chairs) in the American Planning Association and the Association of
the Collegiate School of Planning and through the education of doctoral students who
have gone on to take senior faculty positions in a great many planning departments. We
have worked to create the Planning Accreditation Board (PAB) that is now a nationally
sanctioned accrediting body and helped to structure its operations and standards. And,
we are currently involved in multiple efforts to link ACSP to parallel groups of planning
academics in other parts of the world. Our approach to the core and to teaching in a way
that blends theory and practice has had an impact on planning education around the
world, not only through our publications but also through each successive generation of
graduates of our Ph.D. Program who have carried our model to other parts of the world.
Since the certainty of the early sixties, the Department has, at times, had more than a
lovers quarrel with the orthodox planning profession. We have sometimes marched
to a different drummer. In the end, though, there have also been some members of our
senior faculty who assumed leadership roles within the profession and worked from the
inside to promote constructive change. It is not obvious that MIT is currently represented
in professional planning circles in a way that will allow us to have the same level of impact
on the profession that we once had.
10. What more must we do to ensure a racially, ethnically and gender-diverse faculty and
student body, especially at a time when affrmative action is under attack in the courts?
For more than 35 years, the DUSP has been committed to ensuring greater representation
of what John Howard (in 1970) called heretofore underrepresented constituencies.
For decades, the DUSP has invested substantial portions of its discretionary funds in
fnancial aid, faculty appointments and program support aimed at expanding the number
of students, faculty and staff of color in the Department. Current DUSPers may not
appreciate how far back this effort goes (including, in the early 1970s, Mel Kings creation
of the Community Fellows Program and Frank Jones effort to fnd HUD Support for the
Minority Internship Program).
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The faculty has become more diverse in terms of gender, but to date this has been
accomplished largely by making senior appointments. Department faculty helped
form the Women in Planning group during the 1970s and hosted conferences on this
during the 1980s and 1990s, yet the Schools report on the status of women showed that
signifcant barriers remain.
We have accomplished a lot in terms of diversifying the department, but there is always
more to do.
11. Does the governance structure of the Department properly balance student concerns,
junior faculty involvement and staff engagement in decision-making of various kinds?
More than any other Department at MIT, DUSP has committed to student involvement
in decision-making. For many faculty, the scope of student participation in admissions
decisions, for instance, is very uncomfortable. Nevertheless, the Departments
commitment to student involvement in all decisions has been undiminished. In other
Departments, the Department Head has unilateral authority over many of the decisions
that we try to make collaboratively in DUSP. Junior faculty are much more engaged in
a variety of policy-making activities than they are in many other departments. Should we
re-visit our commitment to decentralization and collaborative decision-making? Are there
costs and adverse impacts that have resulted from these policies that offset the obvious
benefts?
12. The Ph.D. Program: Has it Changed? Should it?
With regard to the Ph.D. program, we suggest that the not much has really changed
theme applies here. We started from the beginning looking for people who were primarily
interested in an academic career. We still consider the Ph.D. in our feld less an advanced
professional degree and more an academic credential. The frst feld (discipline)/second
feld (applied area) is the same structure outlined when Susskind was chair of the Ph.D.
committee in the early 1980s. The focus of the frst year seminar on knowing how to
frame a researchable question was what he and Bob Fogelson taught. So, while the content
of the various specialized areas has changed and the range of dissertation topics has
shifted, the mission and structure of the doctoral program have not changed very much.
But should they? If so how? How are fnancial hurdles changing its nature in any case?
What can be done to make sure the Department can make competitive offers to attract the
top applicants?
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Section C. For Everything There is a Season
The Department has come a long way since Jack Howard presided with an iron hand over
those fourteen required courses. Today we stand at the top of our league as measured
by opinion polls (whatever one thinks of their ultimate value.) We get more applications
from smart people than we can accommodate. Our acceptance rate (i.e. yield on offers of
admission) is staggeringly high given the high cost of tuition and expenses (the fnancial
aid we offer is substantial, but falls far short of fnancial need). We have gotten three top
people through the MIT tenure maze. We have a Dean who shares our values and is a
tiger in defending her brood.
As this brief history reveals, many questions have been asked. Some have been answered.
Many reappear in new variations: the need for fnancial assistance for students, the
short-fall on research dollars, the concern for suffcient minority applicants, our role with
undergraduates, the Institute as a whole and our relationship to technology. Practice and
research balance precariously. And on and on. Much work lies ahead.
We are indebted to two remarkable chairs who have guided us with grace through the last
ffteen years. But now that reign is ending. The torch of leadership is about to pass. It has
been burning brightly and we must ensure it will continue to do so.
To whom and how we pass it and what we ask of the person to whom it is passed lie
before us. Transitions in leadership are a good time to think about where we stand and
where we want to go, but a new head must recognize where we have come from and
what the recurring issues and patterns are that have defned us. If we choose someone
from outside as our head, will they understand where we have come from and respect the
features of our community that are most important? If we choose someone from inside,
will they be able to help us get past the kinds of limits and boundaries that have continued
to constrain us? The upcoming retreat is an opportunity to clarify those aspects of our past
we want to preserve and those we want to escape.
With variations on Tennysons Ulysses we might say that:
Tho much is taken, much abides
That which we are, we are
One equal temper of heroic hearts
Strong in will
To strive to seek, to fnd, and not to yield.
At least that is our frm desire, and our hope.
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In preparation for a March 2007 DUSP Faculty Retreat,
Larry Vale asked a small group of faculty to pull together
this brief background paper discussing broader changes
going on in the feld of planning and what they might
mean for the future of the department. The faculty were
drawn from each of the four program groups, but were
not intended to represent the groups, simply to provide
different points of view.
To develop the paper, we frst responded individually to
two questions:
What are the 4-5 most important trends that will change
life in cities (regions included) over the next 25 years?
How could each of these trends affect the scholarship
and practice of planning and development?
In responding to the questions, we challenged ourselves to
be specifc, but not necessarily comprehensive, meaning
we felt no need to cover every trend affecting cities, just to
cite several that are important to us. Finally, we considered
trends that extended beyond own particular areas of
interest. The responses were collated and combined into
a common set of trends, which were then fed back for
reconsideration by the group, revised, submitted to the full
faculty for comment, and are presented below.
This technique produced some interesting results. Most
striking, we found it relatively easy to reach consensus on
key trends that were emerging in city design, international
development, environmental planning, and community
development. These trends may evidence themselves in
different ways and may be described in different language,
but they seem to be showing up in the literature and
practice across the feld. Perhaps this is one measure of
Appendix II: Trends in Cities, Planning,
and Development that Will Affect the
Future of DUSP
February 2007
Dennis Frenchman
Frank Levy
Bish Sanyal
Lawrence Susskind
J. Phillip Thompson
Lawrence Vale
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the depth of enormous transformations that are underway in cities worldwide. It may also
highlight that differences between extremes in the feld are eroding and that core issues
are emerging that crosscut old boundaries.
The trends describe various ways that city function is changing. We make note, however,
that human actors create and interpret city functions in various ways, and that actors
implement, infuence, and resist the trends described. As planners we are interested in
both knowing and changing the world in concert with other actors. Therefore, the study of
how actors perceive cities and global trends is crucial not only for understanding outcomes
but also for shaping them.
Of all the trends, one emerged as a meta-trend that reinforces the above conclusion.
This trend is the growing impact of international forces, and institutions on the viability
of cities. Of course, this is not new. In the past, international institutions of fnance,
governance, design and development have had enormous impact on planning in
developing countries, but increasingly, planners in developed countries also are fnding
that they need to play in the global arena. We are not just talking here about planning for
mega cities and regions like New York or London, but the smaller and poorer forgotten
cities as well. And so, international institutions that set the rules will increasingly need to
be dealt with, if globalization is to be channeled towards a better quality of life for ordinary
places and people. This is an overarching issue for planning both physical and economic
development that our students will need to engage in the future and suggests that DUSP
will continue to become more internationally oriented.
Given this context, key trends that will change cities and city planning are as follows:
1. Climate Change
The warming of the earths atmosphere caused by greenhouse gases will have an
accelerating effect on cities over the next 25 years. In the near term it will cause efforts to
reduce fossil fuel consumption; in the longer term, rising sea levels will directly affect the
majority of the earths urban population. These changes will occur much more quickly
than generally understood, particularly affecting the planning feld because it is oriented to
the future.
The drive to energy effciency, after years of gestation, is now taking hold at the building
level as the architecture and development industries adopt standards as common practice.
As with any fundamental change in standards, like fre codes, this will affect the materials,
form, siting and appearance of buildings world wide, changing the look (and performance)
of cities, particularly those that wish to market themselves as progressive. On the
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larger scale, forces affecting land use, transportation, and development practices are
accumulating more slowly but standards are now being promulgated at the community
scale as well, aiming towards higher densities, mixed use, reduced travel, and more
effcient modes of transportation. One stumbling block is the lack of revolutionary models
for an integrated system of transportation and building. This is a clear challenge to
planning and an area that will receive growing attention in the future, since virtually all of
our current models are still based on urban concepts developed early in the 20th century
at a time of cheap energy.
The rise in sea levels may seem a distant problem but will be a driving issue of planning
in 25 years, since 14 of the worlds 17 largest metropolitan areas, half of its population, and
a majority of the poor live in low lying coastal areas already subject to fooding where the
rise of only a few inches will have profound effects. The protection, redesign, or relocation
of populations will require an immense investment of resources over the next century
drawing money from other needed priorities, while demanding that we rethink traditional
practices for siting and designing cities. While wealthy cities may be able to make these
trade-offs, the poor and forgotten cites will require broad national, or international
strategies to cope. New Orleans is just the opening line.
Such issues of sustainability are increasingly becoming an important measure of
success in development decision-making, taking an equal seat with the traditional
measures of economic growth, fairness and livability. After all, gains in these latter
areas are meaningless if they cannot be sustained in the long term due to widespread
environmental degradation. Addressing this basic reality has been made a priority of MIT
and the school, and DUSP should continue to take a lead role in efforts like the Energy
Effcient City. Within the department, we should be teaching our students about complex
human-environment systems and how to apply this knowledge to invent new models of
development. Finally, the research hosted by our department needs to refect the emerging
signifcance of sustainability as a measure of success in development for both poor and
wealthy cities. This will involve agencies and partners (worldwide) that are not necessarily
the same ones that DUSP has worked with in the past.
2. Migration
Rural to urban and transnational migration, a theme of the 20th century, will continue
to accelerate over the next 25 years, producing a world of mega-cities. In China, alone,
it is estimated that the urban population will increase by 600 million during this time
frame, requiring the equivalent construction of 50 cities the size of Shanghai. The impact
of such rapid urbanization is already apparent. In developing countries, many cities have
been strained beyond limits, unable to provide basic services to tens of millions of people
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who live in informal settlements without adequate water, sanitation or health services
to say nothing of education and jobs. There is a trend towards greater confict in such
cities, and a parallel demand for increased security, as newcomers and diverse ethnic
groups contest for territory, resources, employment and cultural identity. Economic
inequality across the world continues to increase, driven mainly by the changing global
economy, and this impacts all other trends described in this paper. How to integrate poor
people into the fabric of the city, without creating warfare on one hand, or sprawl (which
is highly ineffcient and consumes resources) on the other, is an enormous planning
and development challenge that will involve strategies of design, property rights, utility
provision, service delivery, public and private fnance, and in particular, education to help
assimilation.
Similar issues of migration are increasingly being felt in the cities of the developed
world in the US, where immigrants from Latin America are providing a growing
percentage of the urban service workforce, in Europe, where immigrants from the east
have been isolated at the edges of cities, and in the Middle East, where wealthy countries
are importing vast numbers of guest laborers, many highly skilled, from India and
Africa to build opulent cities at low wages. Housed in camps and dormitories, much like
mill workers in the 19th century, they are destined to become a permanent underclass
struggling for rights and property. At the same time, in declining industrialized areas of
the US and Europe and elsewhere, rapid dissolution of cities is occurring, as jobs vanish
and populations migrate to opportunities elsewhere, leaving behind those who have
few skills or resources. Meanwhile, ethnic diversity is increasing in the cities of wealthy
nations, due to declines in fertility rates and changes in family structure among the native-
born, coupled with global migration from the developing world to the wealthy North.
It is not yet clear whether or how the planning feld can make a meaningful impact on
these macro forces of urbanization and poverty. Enrique Pealosa (former Mayor of
Bogota) argues for focusing on the physical qualities of place for the poor, pointing out
that parks, public amenities, public transportation, and fewer cars can redress inequalities,
enhancing the image of the city, and attracting investment into poor areas. Others focus
on education as the means for poor migrants to achieve upward mobility, pointing out
that globalization is creating jobs in cities that require increasing levels of knowledge and
social skills. Early childhood education in particular is seen more and more as critical to
developing cognitive and interpersonal skills in emigrant children that will enable them to
compete with native-born kids. Still others have focused on micro-enterprises and lending.
It is important to recall that the planning feld arose out of similar circumstances and
efforts at the end of the 19th century, to provide a way out of the wretched conditions of
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ethnic working class people in the industrial city, which in many ways was successful.
Also, that migration to cities has been a strategy for countless millions of people to
improve the quality of their lives and to take advantage of opportunities unavailable in
their home communities, while at the same time adding to the rich diversity of urban
culture. Finding a new paradigm for extending the benefts of urban life more quickly to
more people lies at the heart of the planning challenge over the next 25 years. Similarly,
in DUSP, framing this complex problem for students in ways that they can engage it and
contribute to solutions in research and practice is one of our greatest challenges.
3. Race and Ethnic Conficts
Race and ethnic conficts are proliferating around the world. There are at least three
types of race and ethnic conficts that often overlap: (1) North/South tensions between
the U.S. and Europe and people of color in the developing world, conficts that are rooted
in legacies of colonialism and slavery; (2) longstanding conficts within countries rooted
in caste, segregation, ethnic/racially-privileged access to resources; and (3) new conficts
spurred by large-scale migrations.
In the frst category, there is wide-spread resentment towards U.S./European military
intervention in the Middle East and insistence on military superiority; there is widespread
resentment towards U.S./European trade agreements with developing nations and with
structural adjustment programs forced on poor nations; there is emerging resistance
to U.S./European insistence on clean sustainable development on the part of poor
countries when the rich countries did neither, and in Africa, there is broad consensus that
U.S./Europeans owe reparations for the lasting effects of the slave trade and widespread
killing of Africans post-slavery in pursuit of the continents vast natural resources.
Why are race/ethnic conficts rising today? There are many possible explanations. Rising
poverty in much of the developing world (and parts of the developed world) intensify
the competitive struggle of groups for resources and economic advantage. The inability
of post-colonial governments to meet economic needs prompts leaders to utilize ethnic
rivalries to justify their rule and divert attention from economic issues. In some countries,
there is deep resistance to the intrusion of foreign culture stemming from increased
mobility and information fows (through cell phones and the internet, for example), and
from global economic integration. Democracy itself, often promoted by the West, may
be a culprit rather than a solution. Democracy, often misconstrued as merely a majority
rule system, often fails to protect minority rights. This weak form of democracy does
not resolve deep race and ethnic conficts, but may empower majority groups to oppress
minority groupsas in Iraq. The U.S. and Europe have little to teach the developing world
on how to solve this problem.
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The implications for cities are substantial. There are nearly a billion under-employed
or unemployed workers worldwide, mostly people of color concentrated in cities. There
is a growing trend of high street crime, gang violence, ethnic street fghting, and in
some places, urban civil war. Metropolitan space is being rapidly reconfgured as a
result, as wealthier families retreat to gated communities, distancing themselves from
poor neighborhoods, and as security measures become a dominant feature of urban
architecture and urban design. Under these conditions, it will be diffcult to promote
concepts of dense and compact urban living a key feature of sustainable urban
development. In poor cities in the developing world, basic planning practices such as
open space preservation, the separation of noxious and residential land uses, the collection
and disposal (or recycling) of waste are breaking down. Some cities are becoming
ungovernable because local government cannot provide security, water, sanitation, or
other basic services.
Silence on the above issues in the feld of planning is striking. In the U.S., many of the
crucial issues tearing apart low-income communities of color AIDS rates on par with
South Africa, the incarceration of a majority of black men without a college degree in
black communities, majority illiteracy, structural unemployment, and rising black-Latino
conficts are little discussed in planning discourse. The silence of planners is not
innocent, but refects the dominant conservative discourse in recent decades that attributes
mass black incarceration to criminality rather than unemployment, that attributes
illiteracy to an underclass culture rather than racial segregation and fscal inequality in
schooling, that treats politics and political participation as separable from development,
and that treats race as cultural preference isolated from questions of wealth, history, and
power. These later two issues are also downplayed in international development, as are
crucial issues such as how to plan post confict, how to empower marginal groups through
the planning process itself, and the question of a relevant model for governance beyond
majority- rule democracy. Learning to address race and ethnic conficts as central to many
planning issues, rather than as a separate problem, will increasingly become a challenge
for planning education and for DUSP.
4. Technology
As in the past, advancing technology will have a major impact on city form, power
structures, and economics over the next 25 years. As the digital revolution accelerates,
the fundamental nature of planning will also change. Digital technology frst made its
impact on the workplace in the 1980s with the advent of the personal computer that vastly
increased productivity and facilitated distributed production. In the 1990s the advent
of the internet changed the nature of the home into a place for work, consumption, and
entertainment as well as living. Now, with the advent of wireless communications, digital
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technology is moving into the space between the home and the workplace, into the public
realm of shopping, entertainment, culture, education, civic, and social spaces where much
of our urban life occurs.
The sweeping impacts of these events are so obvious they are often overlooked. There are
now about 3 billion cell phones in use worldwide, the majority in developing countries
that account for 79% of the growth with no end in sight (India is adding 7 million a
month.) Scores if not hundreds of cities are now in the process of providing ubiquitous
public wireless access to the internet. The advent of RFID tags, replacing bar codes with
interactive devices, will allow all people and products to be identifed and communicate
with each other. We are putting the equivalent of a nervous system into cities that
will enable them to be sensed as a living system and eventually to respond, yielding
tremendous effciencies and a higher quality of life.
The easiest example of benefts is in the area of traffc, where digital technology will sense
the movement of vehicles and change signage and lane markings to maximize effcient
use of the road network in real time, or implement congestion pricing (as in Central
London). Parking will be streamlined by assigning empty spaces to incoming vehicles that
are directed to the location, eliminating searches for parking and saving up to 30% of the
total energy consumed by cars in cities. Similar benefts across a range of urban functions
are possible at a fraction of the cost of physical construction which, until now, was the only
way of upgrading the performance of urban systems.
From a planning perspective there are several implications to this revolution. On the
physical side, the city, itself, is now providing streams of data through which we can better
understand and analyze urban functions in real time, leading to better management and
design. On the social side, the presence of ubiquitous communications and information
provides a vehicle through which constituencies can organize themselves both as markets
and as political forces to effect change. This includes disadvantaged and forgotten
communities, where digital storytelling and networks have become a means to reassert
local needs. And so, a new more fractured set of groups and constituencies will need to
be served. However, the same technology provides a way forward to get them into the
planning decision process (actively or passively) in a real time way an alternative to the
old planning mode of endless studies and meetings to reach conclusions that are outdated
on arrival. More about this in the next topic.
DUSP is now ahead of the feld in research on the digital city across the spectrum: from
collection and display of real time information, to middleware that can collate urban
data from multiple sources, to the design of environments that can change and respond.
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Research is also underway on ways to engage the public through open source methods.
Both the physical and social implications of the digital city are natural growth areas across
a department situated in MIT, providing opportunities for engagement with cities and
companies to invent and deploy new urban systems. However, our students and faculty
will need to become more conversant with media technology as a planning paradigm to
realize this potential.
5. Complex Decision-Making
The reformist ideal of getting broad public and technical input into the plan-making
process is growing increasingly more complicated. On the one hand, there are growing
requirements for the involvement of stakeholders, in the design, implementation, and
evaluation of public services and private development -- at every level. It is no longer
possible in most democratic countries for government to impose planning and policy
decisions on an unsuspecting population. Public participation requirements, mandates for
disclosure of information, impact assessment procedures, and required public hearings all
mean that concerned citizens or at least those that show up -- will have a say. However,
public offcials are often not held accountable for implementing what the people seem
to want. How to make public engagement more effective, and to manage the ad hoc
involvement of large numbers of groups and individuals is not all that clear.
On the other hand, the growing scale and complexity of urban developments are requiring
increasingly sophisticated science to understand their impacts. Here, too, politics can
overrule policy-making, putting the public at risk. There are many issues like global
warming, health, homeland security, water supply, preservation of agriculture, natural
hazard management, energy supply and biotechnology that can quickly destroy whole
communities that must be taken into account in planning. Responsible public offcials
are increasingly looking to their professional staffs to fgure out ways of injecting expert
judgments into the process.
How to include the public and scientifc judgments in planning decisions in the face of
demands for immediate action posed by rapid urban change will challenge our ideals of
deliberative planning over the next 25 years. Consensus building experiments and models
have become much more prevalent, but unless we can fnd ways to more quickly and
powerfully demonstrate the effects of development on the everyday lives of people, then
political agendas will continue to trump rational decision-making. New media interfaces
may provide some of the answer by making sophisticated models of environmental,
transportation, and other impacts accessible to lay people, demystifying the science and
allowing them to see the impact of alternatives on their lives in real time. The need will
remain, however, to evolve new institutions that can protect the public from the long-term
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consequences of short-term politics.
To learn about this topic, our students will need to get involved in actual civic engagement
efforts while they are in school, and we may need to include more resource people in
our teaching who have relevant experience. At the same time, we have much to learn from
other MIT departments in media, science, and management, for example, about how
to more powerfully communicate scientifc and technical fndings to a broad audience.
Finally, our feld-work and practica may need to focus more intensively on the scientifc
and technical aspects of planning for us to be sure that our students are prepared for the
work assignments that will face them.

6. Large-Scale Development
The drive to establish new towns and redevelop cities is deeply rooted in planning, going
back to the origins of the feld in the Garden City movement of the early 20th century
and to major projects of the 1930s and 1960s. These kinds of large projects became
less prevalent towards the end of the 20th century, but now they reappearing. In fact, the
overall scale of development in general is expanding rapidly, fueled by changes in the real
estate industry, the availability of large sources of capital (REITS), urbanization, and global
ambitions.
It is important to recognize that the current generation of projects is very different
from the new towns or urban renewal in the past. First of all, they are much larger and
happening all over the world. Development plans for of districts of 1/2 million people have
become rather commonplace in China. Cities ranging from 250,000 to over 2 million are
in the development stages across the Islamic world from Morocco to Pakistan. Major
projects are beginning across Europe, in Scandinavia, Eastern Europe, and London where
the continents largest development is underway adjacent to Kings Cross Station, terminus
of the new trans-European high-speed rail line. In the US as well, increasingly larger
projects are rising, from Stapleton in Denver to Atlantic Yards in Brooklyn.

While many of these are initiated by the public sector, they are being planned and
implemented by sophisticated private development frms with a broad range of skills
and access to their own sources of capital. They are building not only homes (for a range
of incomes) and offces but also infrastructure, ports, universities, stadiums and whole
urban systems. We are seeing the emergence of a new city building industry that is highly
integrated in all aspects from planning to service delivery. The products look and operate
quite differently from conventional cities with new forms of organization and governance,
involving large-scale resident management associations or hybrids that incorporate
businesses and institutions as well. Quality services from transportation to education to
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computer maintenance are delivered as a business (in which the public may own shares),
not through a public entity subject to political pressure. This creates multiple income
streams that are the real source of value in the developments. We can fnd fault with
this approach, but such cities may be more agile and competitive in the 21st century and
increasingly successful.
Finally, the best of these projects are focused on creating livable environments with a
strong sense of place and cultural themes. This is to attract residents and business to
locate there, of course, but there are other reasons. Firstly, the governments that initiate
large scale projects are interested in enhancing their national identity and culture; a kind
of nation building through real estate development. And so a new city in Saudi Arabia
includes a (new) old port district to give the place a sense of history and connection to
the Saudi story. Secondly, education from early childhood to universities has emerged as a
central force in these projects (as it has in cities everywhere), taking its place next to value-
added industry and global exchange. Finally, developers realize that the ubiquitous image
of modern western cities is losing its appeal and that local themes offer greater identity in
the global marketplace. Given that tourism has become the worlds largest industry, the
power of place-making to attract people, companies and investment cant be ignored.
It is essential that planning students appreciate the evolving role of the real estate industry
and markets as a central force in making and managing cities. These large-scale projects,
in particular, provide a platform for experimentation and lessons that could be valuable for
reforming older cities, as well.
7. Emergence of a Hybrid Public-Private Realm
Extending the previous discussion, there has been a debate across the planning feld since
the 1980s about whether the public or private sector is the most appropriate and effective
vehicle for developing and managing basic infrastructure and services. While privatization
was the rage a decade ago, many argue that it is now clear that it is not possible to achieve
fair and effcient service delivery by turning responsibility over to the private sector. No
doubt the public sector still has a huge role to play, particularly in the developing world
where DUSP is focused on training planners who can use the government planning
apparatus to facilitate development.
On the other hand, many governments are under increasing fscal stress, in which
large segments of the population dont see rising incomes and oppose tax increases;
and growing demands for social and medical services will soak up budgets before we
even consider the challenges of terrorism, global warming, and increasing migration.
This means that for many places, the public sector will increasingly withdraw from
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development activities and turn to partnership with the private sector. In practice, across
the world, we are seeing a growing reliance on new partnerships to design, deliver, and
maintain a wide variety of what was formerly provided entirely by the government. In
the process, historical notions of public and private may need to give way to more
sophisticated mixed models of the economy and the polity. After all, when a government
partners with a private company that it partially owns and is partially owned by thousands
of private individuals to provide public services, what are we really talking about?
There is a tantalizing parallel to this social science debate in the physical arena. Since
the 1980s cities have increasingly looked to private developers to provide and manage
public space, infrastructure, amenities, even parks. Critics have decried privatization of
the public realm, claiming we are losing our social milieu, community, even democracy,
itself. Meanwhile people fock to shopping malls are talking on their cell phones to wider
networks of friends and colleagues then ever before. The fact that we can now participate
in communities from our home, or share private information with someone in China
on the town green, illustrates that the old concepts of the public and private realms are
breaking down, at least at the edges.
It is useful to think about this change as the emergence of a third realm. We will continue
to have public and private space (and institutions) of course, but in the future their scope
will be more limited. The third realm is neither public nor private, but has aspects of both
with some entirely new characteristics, as well. In this realm, the contracts of public and
private ownership and control of activities that we have used since the start of industrial
revolution to manage, develop and design space are giving way to a more fuid system
in which rights and proft are negotiated in a more fuid and temporal way. Physical
environments of this kind are highly responsive and ever changing, not so much owned
and built but produced and managed from the middle according to a set of rules but built
up by many, many contributors. Perhaps we could think about the emergence of new
planning institutions in the same kind of way.
8. Holistic Thinking About the City
We conclude by focusing not so much on a trend but on a need -- which is emerging in
the literature and practice -- to think again about the whole entity of what we call the city.
Such thinking was largely discredited a generation ago along with large-scale government
intervention. But the piecemeal way of thinking and acting on the city by sector has
problems as well. The more we learn about the sectors, the more we understand that they
are a function of something else. Effcient transportation cannot be achieved without
dealing with land use; community empowerment is a function of technology; we cannot
help the poor without understanding the rich. And so there is a growing need for people
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who have a holistic understanding of the city and can innovate by applying the lessons in
one area to advances in another. These are the planners.
But the feld is suffering from a dearth of models (institutional and physical) of what the
holistic city could be. The lack of serious research in this area on the academic side in
particular, has created a vacuum in practice. In practice, there are only two models out
there: The mass produced Modern City with its segregated land uses and classes connected
by highways, which crystallized in the 1930s; or the 1980s New Urbanist vision of a
return to small town life, where the rich are integrated with the poor in a neo-traditional
environment. We can fnd simplifed versions of both models in development all over the
world. In the face of rapid growth (or dissolution), and in the absence of alternative models
or processes or institutions, these models are the ones that cities and developers are
grabbing and throwing on the ground -- for the rich or the poor, it doesnt matter.
Neither one takes into account the complex trends and forces discussed above. We can do
better. After years of assessment and study, we have a more sophisticated understanding
of how sectors of the city work, or dont. We also have an increasing ability to overlay
multiple complex systems to see patterns and understand interactions that could lead to
new models of city and new approaches to problems.
We may begin by simply looking across the trends and asking: What will they add up to?
Or, what kind of city do we want them to add up to? It would be a city that is made energy
effcient, for sure, by being fairly dense, less dependent on the car, with a fne grain of
mixed uses. It would be culturally diverse, with newcomers not concentrated in ghettos
but absorbed into the physical and economic fabric; in other words it would grow from
within as well as without. It would be a city where racial and ethnic confict is reduced
through the empowerment of multiple groups who have equal access to the benefts of
urban life. These goals may be supported by urban systems that are managed in real
time to achieve maximum effciency, and an environment that responds to needs for
information and safety, changes in weather, and desires for cultural expression or civic
art. The performance of these systems would be accessible to common people and interest
groups, who could test alternatives, and voice their opinions in meetings or from their
homes. Hybrid associations and partnerships would provide a range of services, as well as
space, customizable to individual needs and incomes by the day, the week, or the decade.
We could add that the city would be built around responsive physical places. It would
contain a high level of amenities, natural spaces and parks to absorb water, but also to
spread benefts to those who cannot personally afford them. And fnally, learning in all of
its many forms would be a central function of the city, both as vehicle both to lift people
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from poverty and as an economic engine.
The power of DUSP is that by bringing together the edges of the feld we can see covalent
trends emerging that others cannot, and draw on our different experience and perspectives
to invent new approaches to planning and to the conception of the city, itself. To achieve
this potential, however, requires that we respect diverse intellectual contributions of one
another in scholarship and practice, and be willing to step into other sectors of the feld in
order to learn more about our own.
So, perhaps this is the big challenge for us -- to refocus on the idea of the holistic city and
to invent new ways of conceiving, modeling, and talking about it. To take up this challenge
would mean that we become more future oriented, that we work through partnerships
in research, teaching and practice with engineering, architecture, political science, and
media, for example -- to help us build institutions of the third realm, and fnally, that we
reassert the role of planners as problem solvers, and creative protagonists in the task of
inventing new forms of the city.

Refections
As a postscript, these trends raise some challenges for DUSP that we may consider at
the retreat and in the future as the department evolves. More importantly, they provide
benchmarks for understanding change that is happening right now in our midst, which
can help us to separate what is of the future and what is of the past. Perhaps we should
be asking: How are these changes already refected in our department? Once recognized,
we can then go on to fgure out how to more forcefully engage the future. Here are some
places where the trends may be felt:
Scope DUSP is gradually becoming larger and more complex as the number of
students and faculty grow along with our engagements. This experience parallels an
accelerating demand worldwide for city planners and thinkers who can help cities
deal with issues like rapid urbanization (or dissolution), environmental degradation,
ethnic confict, and competition in the global marketplace. There is an explosion in the
number of planning and development institutions, associations, and networks, from
the China Planning Network spawned in our own department to ULI Europe and APA
Asia. We also see a resurgence of interest in city planning and development in parallel
disciplines: architecture, landscape architecture, civil engineering, technology, business,
and real estate. For example, cities are now joining the media lab, where a new research
initiative, living the future will focus on housing and neighborhoods. In response,
should we continue to grow, or look more to strategic partnerships with our newly found
colleagues?
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Themes Another area of change in DUSP has been the emergence of cross-cutting
research and practice initiatives: The Energy Effcient City, Responsive City, Forgotten
City (including NOLA), and the Urbanization Labs (in India and China). These themes
have emerged out of the interests and commitments of faculty and students to work
together in creative efforts to solve urban problems. They involve multiple disciplines
in DUSP, the institute, and outside agents. As such, they can provide a context for
PhD research, a road map for masters students, and settings for classes. For DUSP,
these initiatives may be the seeds of a way forward that promotes understanding and
engagement of the whole city, rather than the traditional sectors. As they mature, we
might ask: Are these the right themes? How many can we afford? How can we nurture
them as engines of ideas and innovation?
Resources Support from the central administration is not keeping pace with the
demand in DUSP for people and programs (particularly PhD), paralleling the trend we fnd
in many cities. At the same time, cities and the emerging city-building industry are now
sponsoring urban studies at a scale we havent seen in the past. So Paulo, Kyiv, Mexico
City, Zaragoza, Barcelona, Florence, Seoul, Beijing, Shenzhen and the Vanke Corporation
among others have all contributed to our educational programs over the past year or so.
Can we turn such sources of funding into a reliable base of support? Elsewhere at MIT,
departments have formed research consortia around themes like those above, to attract
diverse sponsors who then share in the products. Would this work in DUSP? What can
we offer to potential sponsors? Could we continue to pursue our own agendas and values?
Action Over the past several years we have moved towards learning and research
through active engagement in workshops and practica. This approach has enabled
students to test theories while dealing with realities in the feld. What can we learn from
these experiences about how to plan more effectively? Its time to focus on this question,
since virtually all of the trends point to the need for a new approach to planning and
development, involving partnerships, for example, that can negotiate multiple interests
and experts, using advanced technology to quickly make complex decisions. Our feld
activities could provide an ideal vehicle to test such ideas on the way to inventing a new
model of practice. To reinvent planning is a challenge uniquely suited to DUSP, part of
our intellectual tradition that should be resurrected, to insure that the planners we teach
can be effective in the future.
We can conclude that the trends affecting cities are refected in our department as well.
An overarching issue is whether we can weave these strands of change into a new vision
of ourselves.
121
Appendix III: Tomorrow the Universe
122
123
124
125
126
127
128
129
130
Notes
1 Budget Alternatives for 1975-1976, Memorandum from Professors Langley Keyes
and Larry Susskind to Dean William Porter, 25 November 1974. Institute Archives.
2 Karl Taylor Compton, Memorandum of Conversation with Prof. Emerson, March
11, 1932. Institute Archives.
3 Karl T. Compton, Letter to Frederick Adams, 15 June 1936; Frederick Adams, Letter
to Karl T. Compton, 19 June 1936; Gilmore C. Clarke, Letter to Gerard Swope, 6 July 1936.
Institute Archives.
4 Gordon Stephenson, On a Human Scale: A Life in City Design (South Freemantle,
Australia: Freemantle Arts Centre Press, 1992), p. 154.
5 Gordon Stephenson, Letter to Stephen Winship (American Consul, Perth), 1 May
1955. Institute Archives
6 Comments on City Planning Curriculum by Former Students, n.d. (1940).
Frederick J. Adams papers, Institute Archives, MC307, Box 1.
7 Sir Raymond Unwin, Town and Country Planning, Eight Lectures delivered to
students in the School of Architecture at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology during
December 1933 and January 1934. Institute Archives, MC307, Box 1.
8 Letter from Henry Cohen to Frederick J. Adams, n.d. (late 1944). Institute Archives,
Frederick J. Adams papers.
9 Interview: John T. Howard, PLAN 19 (August 1985), p. 5.
10 A.S. Plotkin, MITs Howard Blasts Uncurbed Expressways, Morning Globe, Boston,
MA, October 24, 1962.
Fred Lawson, Auto Makes Slums Obsolete, Wilmington Audience Told, Journal Herald,
Dayton, OH, January 10, 1962.

131
11 Edwin S. Burdell et al., Report of an Ad Hoc Committee to Advise President
Killian on Educational and Research Activities in the Field of City Planning and Urban
and Regional Research at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 20 January 1956.
Institute Archives, MC307, Box 1.
12 Lloyd Rodwin, The Promise and Failure of Urban Research: An Evaluation of the
Experience of the Joint Center for Urban Studies, Talk presented at the 1967 National
Planning Conference of the American Society of Planning Offcials, Houston, Texas. 4
April 1967, p. 1.
13 Ibid., p. 14.
14 Ibid., pp. 21-22.
15 Ibid., p. 4
16 Ibid., p. 18
17 Kevin Lynch, A Center for Urban Research at M.I.T., unpublished memo, 17 July
1951. Institute Archives.
18 Editorial, Boston Globe, May 2, 1984.
19 Stephen Carr, Lloyd Rodwin, and Gary Hack, Kevin Lynch, Memorial Service
tribute, Trinity Church, Copley Square, Boston, May 14, 1984
20 John T. Howard, Annual Report: Department of City and Regional Planning,
Massachusetts Institute of Technology, July 1968, p. 1. Institute Archives.
21 Lawrence Anderson, quoted in Thomas E. Nutt, The Department of Urban Studies
and Planning at Massachusetts Institute of Technology: 1963-1973,Ten Years Makes a
Lifetime, paper prepared for Planning Education Symposium, Chapel Hill, NC, April
1974, p. 12.
132
22 John T. Howard, Annual Report: Department of City and Regional Planning,
Massachusetts Institute of Technology, July 1968, p. 3. Institute Archives.
23 Quoted in Nutt, 1963-1973, Ten Years Makes a Lifetime, p. 17.
24 Lloyd Rodwin, The Promise and Failure of Urban Research, pp. 22-23.
25 Budget Alternatives for 1975-1976, Memorandum from Professors Langley Keyes
and Larry Susskind to Dean William Porter, 25 November 1974. Institute Archives.
26 Quoted in Paul Katzeft, Proper Bostonian: Mel King, Boston Herald American,
Nov. 9, 1980.
27 Donald Schn, Practice-Related Education in the School of Architecture and
Planning, Memo to Dean William Porter, 1972.
28 Think People of Big Cities Live Like Ants Boston Sunday Post, 13 June 1948.
29 Quoted in Discussion: Gary A. Hack and Tunney F. Lee with Jeffrey Cruickshank,
PLAN 1980: Perspectives on Three Decades, p. 158.
30 Quoted in Mayor Asks Dean to Chair Commission, PLAN 21 (June 1986), p. 2.
31 Quoted in Discussion: Gary A. Hack and Tunney F. Lee with Jeffrey Cruickshank,
PLAN 1980: Perspectives on Three Decades, p. 160.
32 Quoted in Design for Development, PLAN 18 (April 1985), p. 5.
33 Interview: Charles H. Spaulding, PLAN 14 (Fall 1983), p. 2.
34 Kevin Lynch, A Center for Urban Research at M.I.T., unpublished memo, 17 July
1951. Institute Archives.
133
Images
v Judy Daniels, MIT Museum
9 MIT Museum
Courtesy DUSP
10 MIT Museum
Joseph Savitzky
Courtesy DUSP
11 Joseph Savitzky
Courtesy DUSP
13 MIT Museum
16 MIT Museum
17 PLAN 20 (1986),
courtesy Antonio C. Kayanan
MIT Museum
18 PLAN 20 (1986),
courtesy Gordon Stephenson
19 MIT Museum
20 Courtesy UC Berkeley
MIT Museum
Courtesy Cornell University
21 Courtesy New School University
MIT Museum
22 MIT Museum
23 MIT Museum
24 MIT Museum
26 MIT Institute Archives and
Special Collections
MIT Museum
Courtesy M. Christine Boyer
Courtesy Judith Innes
Courtesy Rachel Bratt
Matthias Muehlbradt
27 MIT Institute Archives and
Special Collections
29 MIT Museum
Planning: Rethinking Ciudad Guayana,
Lisa Peattie
30 MIT Rotch Library
32 Planning: Rethinking Ciudad Guayana,
Lisa Peattie
SIGUS workshop
33 Justin Knight
34 Planning: Rethinking Ciudad Guayana,
Lisa Peattie
The View from the Barrio, Lisa Peattie
36 Hedrich Blessing,
Chicago Historical Society
MIT Rotch Library
134
37 Kevin Lynch, MIT Institute Archives
and Special Collections
38 MIT Museum
Mark Sluder
39 Kevin Lynch, MIT Institute Archives
and Special Collections
40 MIT Rotch Library
Drawing by Randall Imai
42-3 Drawings by Lawrence B. Anderson,
from unpublished report,
William L. Porter fles, MIT Institute
Archives and Special Collections
44 Boston Globe, November 16, 1965,
MIT Museum
Tunney Lee
MIT Rotch Library
MIT Museum
45 Courtesy Lloyd Rodwin
PLAN 15 (1984)
46 MIT Museum
MIT Freshman picturebook
48 MIT Museum
MIT Rotch Library
Community Innovators Lab
49 MIT Rotch Library
MIT Museum
51 MIT Museum
52 Boston Sunday Post, June 13, 1948,
MIT Museum
MIT Museum
53 MIT Rotch Library
54 MIT Museum
Courtesy Langley Keyes
55 Courtesy Phillip Clay
56 MIT Museum
Courtesy Tunney Lee
57 Courtesy Lawrence Vale
59 JoAnn Carmin
South Florida Water
Management District
60 Courtesy Lawrence Susskind
Ed Quinn, Spectrum Magazine
61 MIT Museum
Anne Whiston Spirn
Dorothea Lange
63 Boston Globe
Places Journal
135
64 MIT Museum
Courtesy Gary Hack
66 Courtesy Center for Real Estate
67 Courtesy Center for Real Estate
MIT Rotch Library
69 Courtesy SPURS
70 MIT Museum
MIT Rotch Library
Courtesy Judith Tendler
Courtesy Alice Amsden

71 MIT Museum
MIT Rotch Library
72 MIT Museum
Karen R. Polenske
73 Courtesy Adams, Howard,
and Greeley
Courtesy Gary Hack
Lloyd Rodwin
75 Courtesy Lorlene Hoyt,
Langley Keyes
76 Gabrielle Kruks-Wisner
Anna Brown
77 Rodrigo Diaz
Mariana Arcaya
Francisco Ruiz
79 Jeffrey Schwartz
Lawrence Vale
80 The New Orleans Times-Picayune
NOLA Main Streets Project
82 Dennis Frenchman
83 China Planning Network
Beijing Urbanization Lab
84 Dennis Frenchman
2006 Beijing Urban Design Studio
86 SENSEable Cities
Zaragoza Milla Digital, Dennis
Frenchman & William J. Mitchell
87 MIT Museum
MIT Rotch Library
Computer Resources Laboratory
89 Judy Daniels
90-1 L. Barry Hetherington
Justin Knight
92-3 Map by Frank Hebbert
121-9 Courtesy Joseph Savitzky