This Semester's Responsive City Seminars

The responsive city seminars are part of the key moments of my stay at MIT for their ability to attract key experts and open participation. This semester they take a slightly more formal spin to become MIT Survey Seminar on Urban Innovations with, as last year, live case studies through talks by invited practitioners as well as surveys of relevant innovation by guest academics. This edition will focus on six themes of emergent urban innovation:

1. New Model for Transportation: How can city design, new vehicle concepts, and technology enable more responsive personal and mass transportation? Guest speaker: William J. Mitchell (Media Lab)

2. Digital Cities: How can personal technology, sensing, urban-scale media, and just-in-time information foster community, sustainability, and a better life-balance? Guest speaker: Dennis Frenchman (MIT Department of Urban Studies and Planning)

3. Live-Work: How can the city plan, architecture, transportation systems, technology, and services support a changing pattern of 24-hour distributed work, virtual offices, livework environments, etc.? Guest speaker: Michael Joroff (MIT Architecture)

4. Distributed/Centralized Energy: How can we design for both distributed and centralized energy? How can heating, cooling, and electrical loads be dramatically reduced through design innovation and technology? Guest speaker: Stephen Connors (MIT Energy Lab)

5. Sustainability, Health, Psychology and “Right to Light”: How can strategies for zoning, massing, density, architecture, and technology improve quality of life? Can every place of living have direct, unblocked sunlight, and views to nature? Guest speaker: Eran Ben-Joseph (MIT Department of Urban Studies and Planning)

6. New Model for Building Design, Fabrication, and Technology Integration: How can mass-customization, disentangled systems, off-site fabrication, and information technology enable agile, adaptable, high-performance, responsive housing? Guest speaker: Jarmo Suominen (Aalto University, Helsinki)