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      Technologies for water conservation and treatment move closer to commercialization

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      The Abdul Latif Jameel Water and Food Systems Lab (J-WAFS) provides Solutions Grants to help MIT researchers launch startup companies or products to commercialize breakthrough technologies in water and food systems. The Solutions Grant Program began in 2015 and is supported by Community Jameel. In addition to one-year, renewable grants of up to $150,000, the program also matches grantees with industry mentors and facilitates introductions to potential investors. Since its inception, the J-WAFS Solutions Program has awarded over $3 million in funding to the MIT community. Numerous startups and products, including a portable desalination device and a company commercializing a novel food safety sensor, have spun out of this support.

      The 2023 J-WAFS Solutions Grantees are Professor C. Cem Tasan of the Department of Materials Science and Engineering and Professor Andrew Whittle of the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering. Tasan’s project involves reducing water use in steel manufacturing and Whittle’s project tackles harmful algal blooms in water. Project work commences this September.

      “This year’s Solutions Grants are being award to professors Tasan and Whittle to help commercialize technologies they have been developing at MIT,” says J-WAFS executive director Renee J. Robins. “With J-WAFS’ support, we hope to see the teams move their technologies from the lab to the market, so they can have a beneficial impact on water use and water quality challenges,” Robins adds.

      Reducing water consumption by solid-state steelmaking

      Water is a major requirement for steel production. The steel industry ranks fourth in industrial freshwater consumption worldwide, since large amounts of water are needed mainly for cooling purposes in the process. Unfortunately, a strong correlation has also been shown to exist between freshwater use in steelmaking and water contamination. As the global demand for steel increases and freshwater availability decreases due to climate change, improved methods for more sustainable steel production are needed.

      A strategy to reduce the water footprint of steelmaking is to explore steel recycling processes that avoid liquid metal processing. With this motivation, Cem Tasan, the Thomas B. King Associate Professor of Metallurgy in the Department of Materials Science and Engineering, and postdoc Onur Guvenc PhD created a new process called Scrap Metal Consolidation (SMC). SMC is based on a well-established metal forming process known as roll bonding. Conventionally, roll bonding requires intensive prior surface treatment of the raw material, specific atmospheric conditions, and high deformation levels. Tasan and Guvenc’s research revealed that SMC can overcome these restrictions by enabling the solid-state bonding of scrap into a sheet metal form, even when the surface quality, atmospheric conditions, and deformation levels are suboptimal. Through lab-scale proof-of-principle investigations, they have already identified SMC process conditions and validated the mechanical formability of resulting steel sheets, focusing on mild steel, the most common sheet metal scrap.

      The J-WAFS Solutions Grant will help the team to build customer product prototypes, design the processing unit, and develop a scale-up strategy and business model. By simultaneously decreasing water usage, energy demand, contamination risk, and carbon dioxide burden, SMC has the potential to decrease the energy need for steel recycling by up to 86 percent, as well as reduce the linked carbon dioxide emissions and safeguard the freshwater resources that would otherwise be directed to industrial consumption. 

      Detecting harmful algal blooms in water before it’s too late

      Harmful algal blooms (HABs) are a growing problem in both freshwater and saltwater environments worldwide, causing an estimated $13 billion in annual damage to drinking water, water for recreational use, commercial fishing areas, and desalination activities. HABs pose a threat to both human health and aquaculture, thereby threatening the food supply. Toxins in HABs are produced by some cyanobacteria, or blue-green algae, whose communities change in composition in response to eutrophication from agricultural runoff, sewer overflows, or other events. Mitigation of risks from HABs are most effective when there is advance warning of these changes in algal communities. 

      Most in situ measurements of algae are based on fluorescence spectroscopy that is conducted with LED-induced fluorescence (LEDIF) devices, or probes that induce fluorescence of specific algal pigments using LED light sources. While LEDIFs provide reasonable estimates of concentrations of individual pigments, they lack resolution to discriminate algal classes within complex mixtures found in natural water bodies. In prior research, Andrew Whittle, the Edmund K. Turner Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering, worked with colleagues to design REMORA, a low-cost, field-deployable prototype spectrofluorometer for measuring induced fluorescence. This research was part of a collaboration between MIT and the AMS Institute. Whittle and the team successfully trained a machine learning model to discriminate and quantify cell concentrations for mixtures of different algal groups in water samples through an extensive laboratory calibration program using various algae cultures. The group demonstrated these capabilities in a series of field measurements at locations in Boston and Amsterdam. 

      Whittle will work with Fábio Duarte of the Department of Urban Studies and Planning, the Senseable City Lab, and MIT’s Center for Real Estate to refine the design of REMORA. They will develop software for autonomous operation of the sensor that can be deployed remotely on mobile vessels or platforms to enable high-resolution spatiotemporal monitoring for harmful algae. Sensor commercialization will hopefully be able to exploit the unique capabilities of REMORA for long-term monitoring applications by water utilities, environmental regulatory agencies, and water-intensive industries.  More

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      3 Questions: How are cities managing record-setting temperatures?

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      July 2023 was the hottest month globally since humans began keeping records. People all over the U.S. experienced punishingly high temperatures this summer. In Phoenix, there were a record-setting 31 consecutive days with a high temperature of 110 degrees Fahrenheit or more. July was the hottest month on record in Miami. A scan of high temperatures around the country often yielded some startlingly high numbers: Dallas, 110 F; Reno, 108 F; Salt Lake City, 106 F; Portland, 105 F.

      Climate change is a global and national crisis that cannot be solved by city governments alone, but cities suffering from it can try to enact new policies reducing emissions and adapting its effects. MIT’s David Hsu, an associate professor of urban and environmental planning, is an expert on metropolitan and regional climate policy. In one 2017 paper, Hsu and some colleagues estimated how 11 major U.S. cities could best reduce their carbon dioxide emissions, through energy-efficient home construction and retrofitting, improvements in vehicle gas mileage, more housing density, robust transit systems, and more. As we near the end of this historically hot summer, MIT News talked to Hsu about what cities are now doing in response to record heat, and the possibilities for new policy measures.

      Q: We’ve had record-setting temperatures in many cities across the U.S. this summer. Dealing with climate change certainly isn’t just the responsibility of those cities, but what have they been doing to make a difference, to the extent they can?

      A: I think this is a very top-of-mind question because even 10 or 15 years ago, we talked about adapting to a changed climate future, which seemed further off. But literally every week this summer we can refer to [dramatic] things that are already happening, clearly linked to climate change, and are going to get worse. We had wildfire smoke in the Northeast and throughout the Eastern Seaboard in June, this tragic wildfire in Hawaii that led to more deaths than any other wildfire in the U.S., [plus record high temperatures]. A lot of city leaders face climate challenges they thought were maybe 20 or 30 years in the future, and didn’t expect to see happen with this severity and intensity.

      One thing you’re seeing is changes in governance. A lot of cities have recently appointed a chief heat officer. Miami and Phoenix have them now, and this is someone responsible for coordinating response to heat waves, which turn out to be one of the biggest killers among climatological effects. There is an increasing realization not only among local governments, but insurance companies and the building industry, that flooding is going to affect many places. We have already seen flooding in the seaport area in Boston, the most recently built part of our city. In some sense just the realization among local governments, insurers, building owners, and residents, that some risks are here and now, already is changing how people think about those risks.

      Q: To what extent does a city being active about climate change at least signal to everyone, at the state or national level, that we have to do more? At the same time, some states are reacting against cities that are trying to institute climate initiatives and trying to prevent clean energy advances. What is possible at this point?

      A: We have this very large, heterogeneous and polarized country, and we have differences between states and within states in how they’re approaching climate change. You’ve got some cities trying to enact things like natural gas bans, or trying to limit greenhouse gas emissions, with some state governments trying to preempt them entirely. I think cities have a role in showing leadership. But one thing I harp on, having worked in city government myself, is that sometimes in cities we can be complacent. While we pride ourselves on being centers of innovation and less per-capita emissions — we’re using less than rural areas, and you’ll see people celebrating New York City as the greenest in the world — cities are responsible for consumption that produces a majority of emissions in most countries. If we’re going to decarbonize society, we have to get to zero altogether, and that requires cities to act much more aggressively.

      There is not only a pessimistic narrative. With the Inflation Reduction Act, which is rapidly accelerating the production of renewable energy, you see many of those subsidies going to build new manufacturing in red states. There’s a possibility people will see there are plenty of better paying, less dangerous jobs in [clean energy]. People don’t like monopolies wherever they live, so even places people consider fairly conservative would like local control [of energy], and that might mean greener jobs and lower prices. Yes, there is a doomscrolling loop of thinking polarization is insurmountable, but I feel surprisingly optimistic sometimes.

      Large parts of the Midwest, even in places people think of as being more conservative, have chosen to build a lot of wind energy, partly because it’s profitable. Historically, some farmers were self-reliant and had wind power before the electrical grid came. Even now in some places where people don’t want to address climate change, they’re more than happy to have wind power.

      Q: You’ve published work on which cities can pursue which policies to reduce emissions the most: better housing construction, more transit, more fuel-efficient vehicles, possibly higher housing density, and more. The exact recipe varies from place to place. But what are the common threads people can think about?

      A: It’s important to think about what the status quo is, and what we should be preparing for. The status quo simply doesn’t serve large parts of the population right now. Heat risk, flooding, and wildfires all disproportionately affect populations that are already vulnerable. If you’re elderly, or lack access to mobility, information, or warnings, you probably have a lower risk of surviving a wildfire. Many people do not have high-quality housing, and may be more exposed to heat or smoke. We know the climate has already changed, and is going to change more, but we have failed to prepare for foreseeable changes that already here. Lots of things that are climate-related but not only about climate change, like affordable housing, transportation, energy access for everyone so they can have services like cooking and the internet — those are things that we can change going forward. The hopeful message is: Cities are always changing and being built, so we should make them better. The urgent message is: We shouldn’t accept the status quo. More

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      Dyanna Jaye: Bringing the urgency of organizing to climate policy

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      Growing up in the Tidewater region of Virginia, Dyanna Jaye had a front row seat to the climate crisis. She recalls beach stabilization efforts that pumped sand from the bottom of the ocean to the shore in response to rising sea levels. And every hurricane season, the streets would flood.

      “I was thinking at a younger age about some pretty big questions,” says Jaye. “Can I call this place home for the rest of my life? Probably not. The changes that we will endure because of climate change will probably make the place where I grew up unlivable in my lifetime.”

      Jaye attended the University of Virginia, where she studied environmental science and global development studies. She also started to get involved in organizing efforts around climate policy. The first campaign she was a part of aimed to retire UVA’s coal plant and move to more renewable energy.

      “We didn’t really win, but I learned a lot in that first campaign,” she says.

      Jaye went on to co-found the Sunrise Movement, which helped launch the Green New Deal as a framework for ambitious, holistic climate policy across the country.

      Now pursuing a master’s in city planning at MIT, Jaye is seeking a deeper understanding of how to implement climate-conscious policy across all levels of government. She hopes to bring the lessons learned back to her home state.

      “My goal is to make it back to Virginia and have a better of an idea of how to plan a multidecade transition that decarbonizes our economy while also building good jobs and protecting the fundamental things that we need in our life,” says Jaye. “Virginia was this place where I felt like I could see both ends of the climate crisis, and realized you need a holistic solution to address all aspects of this.”

      A foundation in organizing

      After graduating from the University of Virginia, Jaye led a delegation of young people from the U.S. to the United Nations to campaign for a global commitment to phase out fossil fuels and fund equitable climate solutions. At the time, the Paris climate agreement was being negotiated. Witnessing that process firsthand was eye-opening.

      Jaye realized to push the U.S. forward in the fight against climate change, she needed to help build a nationwide movement that could push the federal government to enact ambitious policy. Along with six like-minded friends, Jaye co-founded the Sunrise Movement.

      “It feels silly to say this now, but part of Sunrise was just to get climate change to be a more urgent issue, because at the time it was politically unpopular to even talk about it,” Jaye says. “The vision that became the Green New Deal was this plan to decarbonize our society within 10 years and bring all the benefits we can to build a stronger, more connected, and healthier society.”

      Jaye describes her five years with Sunrise as a “wild whirlwind.” As the national organizing director, she worked on engagement strategies to recruit new people to the movement. Following a few key wins at the polls, Sunrise grew from a handful of chapters concentrated in swing states to over 500 chapters across the nation.

      On the other side, crafting policy

      Though she is no longer directly involved with the Sunrise Movement, Jaye has moved onto a different stage of the fight. For the final year of her master’s, she will be writing her thesis while working with the Massachusetts Office of Climate Innovation and Resilience. The office is newly established as of this year, evidence of the federal funding wins that Sunrise helped make possible.

      “Transparently, we wanted to win a lot more,” says Jaye. “We had huge goals, but we did win a lot of things at the federal level. So, the time is now to get federal funding and move it through state implementation and planning, and it’s urgent.”

      The flexibility of the city planning program allows students to study theory while also putting that theory in practice in local government. Jaye’s thesis will focus on the best planning approach for full government strategy, informed by her work in the climate office. While previous climate policy focused purely on the environmental sector, effectively addressing climate change will take a multipronged approach touching every sector, from transportation to housing to energy distribution to food production.

      “What’s really cool about being in the government right now in Massachusetts is getting to see a model as they’re trying to take climate from being an environmental priority to a number one, whole-of-government challenge,” says Jaye. “It’s an issue that’s embedded into every department and level of our government.”

      As she finishes her master’s, Jaye is still keeping an eye toward home. While she isn’t in a rush to leave Massachusetts, she is always thinking about the lessons she’s learning can apply to Virginia. And by building skills in both planning and organizing, Jaye will be well-equipped to make an impact wherever she lands.

      “I still feel very committed to community organizing. We’re living in a divided time where our democracy is being challenged, and organizing is what we need to do to respond to that,” says Jaye. “We also need a lot more people diving in on the work of policy and governance to determine how we transition our economy and our energy system, how are we going to go about doing something like that. Right now, I’m feeling excited to be on that side of the work.” More

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      MIT at the 2023 Venice Biennale

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      The Venice Architecture Biennale, the world’s largest and most visited exhibition focusing on architecture, is once again featuring work by many MIT faculty, students, and alumni. On view through Nov. 26, the 2023 biennale, curated by Ghanaian-Scottish architect, academic, and novelist Lesley Lokko, is showcasing projects responding to the theme of “The Laboratory of Change.”

      Architecture and Planning and curator of the previous Venice Biennale. “Our students, faculty, and alumni have responded to the speculative theme with innovative projects at a range of scales and in varied media.”

      Below are descriptions of MIT-related projects and activities.

      MIT faculty participants

      Xavi Laida Aguirre, assistant professor of architecture

      Project: Everlasting Plastics

      Project description: SPACES, a nonprofit alternative art organization based in Cleveland, Ohio, and the U.S. Department of State’s Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs are behind the U.S. Pavilion’s exhibition at this year’s biennale. The theme, Everlasting Plastics, provides a platform for artists and designers to engage audiences in reframing the overabundance of plastic detritus in our waterways, landfills, and streets as a rich resource. Aguirre’s installation covers two rooms and holds a series of partial scenographies examining indoor proofing materials such as coatings, rubbers, gaskets, bent aluminum, silicone, foam, cement board, and beveled edges.

      Yolande Daniels, associate professor of architecture

      Project: The BLACK City Astrolabe: A Constellation of African Diasporic Women

      Project description: From the multiple displacements of race and gender, enter “The BLACK City Astrolabe,” a space-time field comprised of a 3D map and a 24-hour cycle of narratives that reorder the forces of subjugation, devaluation, and displacement through the spaces and events of African diasporic women. The diaspora map traces the flows of descendants of Africa (whether voluntary or forced) atop the visible tension between the mathematical regularity of meridians of longitude and the biases of international date lines.

      In this moment we are running out of time. The meridians and timeline decades are indexed to an infinite conical projection metered in decades. It structures both the diaspora map and timeline and serves as a threshold to project future structures and events. “The BLACK City Astrolabe” is a vehicle to proactively contemplate things that have happened, that are happening, and that will happen. Yesterday, a “Black” woman went to the future, and here she is.

      Mark Jarzombek, professor of architecture

      Project: Kishkindha NY

      Project description: “Kishkindha NY (Office of (Un)Certainty Research: Mark Jarzombek and Vikramaditya Parakash)” is inspired by an imagined forest-city as described in the ancient Indian text the Ramayana. It comes into being not through the limitations of human agency, but through a multi-species creature that destroys and rebuilds. It is exhibited as a video (Space, Time, Existence) and as a special dance performance.

      Ana Miljački, professor of architecture

      Team: Ana Miljački, professor of architecture and director of Critical Broadcasting Lab, MIT; Ous Abou Ras, MArch candidate; Julian Geltman, MArch; Recording and Design, faculty of Dramatic Arts, Belgrade; Calvin Zhong, MArch candidate. Sound design and production: Pavle Dinulović, assistant professor, Department of Sound Recording and Design, University of Arts in Belgrade.

      Collaborators: Melika Konjičanin, researcher, faculty of architecture, Sarajevo; Ana Martina Bakić, assistant professor, head of department of drawing and visual design, faculty of architecture, Zagreb; Jelica Jovanović, Grupa Arhitekata, Belgrade; Andrew Lawler, Belgrade; Sandro Đukić, CCN Images, Zagreb; Other Tomorrows, Boston.

      Project: The Pilgrimage/Pionirsko hodočašće

      Project description:  The artifacts that constitute Yugoslavia’s socialist architectural heritage, and especially those instrumental in the ideological wiring of several postwar generations for anti-fascism and inclusive living, have been subject to many forms of local and global political investment in forgetting their meaning, as well as to vandalism. The “Pilgrimage” synthesizes “memories” from Yugoslavian childhood visits to myriad postwar anti-fascist memorial monuments and offers them in a shifting and spatial multi-channel video presentation accompanied by a nonlinear documentary soundscape, presenting thus anti-fascism and unity as political and activist positions available (and necessary) today, for the sake of the future. Supported by: MIT Center for Art, Science, and Technology (CAST) Mellon Faculty Grant.

      Adèle Naudé Santos, professor of architecture, planning, and urban design; and Mohamad Nahleh, lecturer in architecture and urbanism; in collaboration with the Beirut Urban Lab at the American University of Beirut

      MIT research team: Ghida El Bsat, Joude Mabsout, Sarin Gacia Vosgerichian, Lasse Rau

      Project: Housing as Infrastructure

      Project description: On Aug. 4, 2020, an estimated 2,750 tons of ammonium nitrate stored at the Port of Beirut exploded, resulting in the deaths of more than 200 people and the devastation of port-adjacent neighborhoods. With over 200,000 housing units in disrepair, exploitative real estate ventures, and the lack of equitable housing policies, we viewed the port blast as a potential escalation of the mechanisms that have produced the ongoing affordable housing crisis across the city. 

      The Dar Group requested proposals to rethink the affected part of the city, through MIT’s Norman B. Leventhal Center for Advanced Urbanism. To best ground our design proposal, we invited the Beirut Urban Lab at the American University of Beirut to join us. We chose to work on the heavily impacted low-rise and high-density neighborhood of Mar Mikhael. Our resultant urban strategy anchors housing within a corridor of shared open spaces. Housing is inscribed within this network and sustained through an adaptive system defined by energy-efficiency and climate responsiveness. Cross-ventilation sweeps through the project on all sides, with solar panel lined roofs integrated to always provide adequate levels of electricity for habitation. These strategies are coupled with an array of modular units designed to echo the neighborhood’s intimate quality — all accessible through shared ramps and staircases. Within this context, housing itself becomes the infrastructure, guiding circulation, managing slopes, integrating green spaces, and providing solar energy across the community. 

      Rafi Segal, associate professor of architecture and urbanism, director of the Future Urban Collectives Lab, director of the SMArchS program; and Susannah Drake.

      Contributors: Olivia Serra, William Minghao Du

      Project:  From Redlining to Blue Zoning: Equity and Environmental Risk, Miami 2100 (2021)

      Project description: As part of Susannah Drake and Rafi Segal’s ongoing work on “Coastal Urbanism,” this project examines the legacy of racial segregation in South Florida and the existential threat that climate change poses to communities in Miami. Through models of coops and community-owned urban blocks, this project seeks to empower formerly disenfranchised communities with new methods of equity capture, allowing residents whose parents and grandparents suffered from racial discrimination to build wealth and benefit from increased real estate value and development.

      Nomeda Urbonas, Art, Culture, and Technology research affiliate; and Gediminas Urbonas, ACT associate professor

      Project: The Swamp Observatory

      Project description: “The Swamp Observatory” augmented reality app is a result of two-year collaboration with a school in Gotland Island in the Baltic Sea, arguably the most polluted sea in the world. Developed as a conceptual playground and a digital tool to augment reality with imaginaries for new climate commons, the app offers new perspective to the planning process, suggesting eco-monsters as emergent ecology for the planned stormwater ponds in the new sustainable city. 

      Sarah Williams, associate professor, technology and urban planning

      Team members: listed here.

      Project: DISTANCE UNKNOWN: RISKS AND OPPORTUNITIES OF MIGRATION IN THE AMERICAS 

      Project description: On view are visualizations made by the MIT Civic Data Design Lab and the United Nations World Food Program that helped to shape U.S. migration policy. The exhibition is built from a unique dataset collected from 4,998 households surveyed in El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras. A tapestry woven out of money and constructed by the hands of Central America migrants illustrates that migrants spent $2.2 billion to migrate from Central America in 2021.

      MIT student curators

      Carmelo Ignaccolo, PhD candidate, Department of Urban Studies and Planning (DUSP)

      Curator: Carmelo Ignaccolo; advisor: Sarah Williams; researchers: Emily Levenson (DUSP), Melody Phu (MIT), Leo Saenger (Harvard University), Yuke Zheng (Harvard); digital animation designer: Ting Zhang

      Exhibition Design Assistant: Dila Ozberkman (architecture and DUSP)

      Project: The Consumed City 

      Project description: “The Consumed City” narrates a spatial investigation of “overtourism” in the historic city of Venice by harnessing granular data on lodging, dining, and shopping. The exhibition presents two large maps and digital animations to showcase the complexity of urban tourism and to reveal the spatial interplay between urban tourism and urban features, such as landmarks, bridges, and street patterns. By leveraging by-product geospatial datasets and advancing visualization techniques, “The Consumed City” acts as a prototype to call for novel policymaking tools in cities “consumed” by “overtourism.”

      MIT-affiliated auxiliary events

      Rania Ghosn, associate professor of architecture and urbanism, El Hadi Jazairy, Anhong Li, and Emma Jurczynski, with initial contributions from Marco Nieto and Zhifei Xu. Graphic design: Office of Luke Bulman.

      Project: Climate Inheritance

      Project description: “Climate Inheritance” is a speculative design research publication that reckons with the complexity of “heritage” and “world” in the Anthropocene Epoch. The impacts of climate change on heritage sites — from Venice flooding to extinction in the Galapagos Islands — have garnered empathetic attention in a media landscape that has otherwise mostly failed to communicate the urgency of the climate crisis. In a strategic subversion of the media aura of heritage, the project casts World Heritage sites as narrative figures to visualize pervasive climate risks all while situating the present emergency within the wreckage of other ends of worlds, replete with the salvages of extractivism, racism, and settler colonialism.   

      Rebuilding Beirut: Using Data to Co-Design a New Future

      SA+P faculty, researchers, and students are participating in the sixth biennial architecture exhibition “Time Space Existence,” presented by the European Cultural Center. The exhibit showcases three collaborative research and design proposals that support the rebuilding efforts in Beirut following the catastrophic explosion at the Port of Beirut in August 2020.

      “Living Heritage Atlas” captures the significance and vulnerability of Beirut’s cultural heritage. 

      “City Scanner” tracks the environmental impacts of the explosion and the subsequent rebuilding efforts. “Community Streets” supports the redesign of streets and public space. 

      The work is supported by the Dar Group Urban Seed Grant Fund at MIT’s Norman B. Leventhal Center for Advanced Urbanism.

      Team members:Living Heritage AtlasCivic Data Design Lab and Future Heritage Lab at MITAssociate Professor Sarah Williams, co-principal investigator (PI)Associate Professor Azra Aksamija, co-PICity Scanner Senseable City Lab at MIT with the American University of Beirut and FAE Technology Professor Carlo Ratti, co-PIFábio Duarte, co-PISimone Mora, research and project leadCommunity Streets City Form Lab at MIT with the American University of BeirutAssociate Professor Andres Sevtsuk, co-PIProfessor Maya Abou-Zeid, co-PISchool of Architecture and Planning alumni participants   Rodrigo Escandón Cesarman SMArchS Design ’20 (co-curator, Mexican Pavilion)Felecia Davis PhD ’17 Design and Computation, SOFTLAB@PSU (Penn State University)Jaekyung Jung SM ’10, (with the team for the Korean pavilion)Vijay Rajkumar MArch ’22 (with the team for the Bahrain Pavilion)

      Other MIT alumni participants

      Basis with GKZ

      Team: Emily Mackevicius PhD ’18, brain and cognitive sciences, with Zenna Tavares, Kibwe Tavares, Gaika Tavares, and Eli Bingham

      Project description: The nonprofit research group works on rethinking AI as a “reasoning machine.” Their two goals are to develop advanced technological models and to make society able to tackle “intractable problems.” Their approach to technology is founded less on pattern elaboration than on the Bayes’ hypothesis, the ability of machines to work on abductive reasoning, which is the same used by the human mind. Two city-making projects model cities after interaction between experts and stakeholders, and representation is at the heart of the dialogue. More

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      Helping the transportation sector adapt to a changing world

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      After graduating from college, Nick Caros took a job as an engineer with a construction company, helping to manage the building of a new highway bridge right near where he grew up outside of Vancouver, British Columbia.  

      “I had a lot of friends that would use that new bridge to get to work,” Caros recalls. “They’d say, ‘You saved me like 20 minutes!’ That’s when I first realized that transportation could be a huge benefit to people’s lives.”

      Now a PhD candidate in the Urban Mobility Lab and the lead researcher for the MIT Transit Research Consortium, Caros works with seven transit agencies across the country to understand how workers’ transportation needs have changed as companies have adopted remote work policies.

      “Another cool thing about working on transportation is that everybody, even if they don’t engage with it on an academic level, has an opinion or wants to talk about it,” says Caros. “As soon as I mention I’ve worked with the T, they have something they want to talk about.”

      Caros is drawn to projects with social impact beyond saving his friends a few minutes during their commutes. He sees public transportation as a crucial component in combating climate change and is passionate about identifying and lowering the psychological barriers that prevent people around the world from taking advantage of their local transit systems.

      “The more I’ve learned about public transportation, the more I’ve come to realize it will play an essential part in decarbonizing urban transportation,” says Caros. “I want to continue working on these kinds of issues, like how we can make transportation more sustainable or promoting public transportation in places where it doesn’t exist or can be improved.”

      Caros says he doesn’t have a “transportation origin story,” like some of his peers who grew up in urban centers with robust public transit systems. As a child growing up in the Vancouver suburbs, he always enjoyed the outdoors, which were as close as his backyard. He chose to study engineering as an undergraduate at the University of British Columbia, fascinated by the hydroelectric dams that supply Vancouver with most of its power. But after two projects with the construction company, the second of which took him to Maryland to work on a fossil fuel project, he decided he needed a change.

      Not quite sure what he wanted to do next, Caros sought out the shortest master’s program he could find that interested him. That ended up being an 18-month master’s program in transportation planning and engineering at New York University. Initially intending to pursue the course-based program, Caros was soon offered the chance to be a research assistant in NYU’s Behavioral Urban Informatics, Logistics, and Transport Laboratory with Professor Joseph Chow. There, he worked to model an experimental transportation system of modular self-driving cars that could link and unlink with each other while in motion.

      “It was this really futuristic stuff,” says Caros. “It turned out to be a really cool project to work on because it’s kind of rare to have a blank-slate problem to try and solve. A lot of transportation engineering problems have largely been solved. We know how to make efficient and sustainable transportation systems; it’s just finding the political support and encouraging behavioral change that remains a challenge.”

      At NYU, Caros fell in love with research and the field of transportation. Later, he was drawn to MIT by its interdisciplinary PhD program that spans both urban studies and planning and civil engineering and the opportunity to work with Professor Jinhua Zhao.

      His research focuses on identifying “third places,” locations where some people go if their job gives them the flexibility to work remotely. Previously, transportation needs revolved around office spaces, typically located in city centers. With more people working from home, the first assumption is that transportation needs would decrease. But that’s not what Caros has found.

      “One major finding from our research is that people have changed where they’re going when they go to work,” says Caros. “A lot of people are working from home, but some are also working in other places, like coffee shops or co-working spaces. And these third places are not evenly distributed in Boston.”

      Identifying the concentration of these third places and what locations would benefit from them is the core of Caros’ dissertation. He’s building an algorithm that identifies ideal locations to build more shared workplaces based on both economic and social factors. Caros seeks to answer how you can minimize travel time across the board while leaving room for the spontaneous social interactions that drive a city’s productivity. His research is sponsored by seven of the largest transit agencies in the United States, who are members of the MIT Transit Research Consortium. Rather than a single agency sponsoring a single specific project, funding is pooled to tackle projects that address general topics that can apply to multiple cities.

      These kinds of problems require a multidisciplinary approach that appeals to Caros. Even when diving into the technical details of a solution, he always keeps the bigger picture in mind. He is certain that changing people’s views of public transportation will be crucial in the fight against climate change.

      “A lot of it is not necessarily engineering, but understanding what the motivations of people are,” says Caros. “Transportation is a leading sector for carbon emissions in the U.S., and so figuring out what makes people tick and how you can get them to ride public transit more, for example, would help to reduce the overall carbon cost.”

      Following the completion of his degree, Caros will join the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development. He already spent six months at its Paris headquarters as an intern during a leave from MIT, something his lab encourages all of its students to do. Last fall, he worked on drafting policy guidelines for new mobility services such as vehicle-share scooters, and addressing transportation equity issues in Ghana. Plus, living in Paris gave him the opportunity to practice his French. Growing up in Canada, he attended a French immersion school, and his internship offered his first opportunity to use the language outside of an academic context.

      Looking forward, Caros hopes to keep tackling projects that promote sustainable public transportation. There is an urgency in getting ahead of the curve, especially in cities experiencing rapid growth.

      “You kind of get locked in,” says Caros. “It becomes much harder to build sustainable transportation systems after the fact. But it’s really just a geometry problem. Trains and buses are a way more efficient way to move people using the same amount of space as private cars.” More

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      in Environment

      MIT climate and sustainability interns consider aviation emissions and climate change

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      Over 600 MIT students are traveling abroad with the MIT International Science and Technology Initiatives (MISTI) to intern, research, and work in organizations across 25 countries this summer. Twenty percent of the students were placed in areas related to climate and sustainability.

      Through MISTI, hundreds of MIT students travel abroad each summer to intern in companies, universities, governments, and nongovernmental organizations. Since 2018, around 20 percent of the internships and research experiences have been in areas related to climate and sustainability. MISTI has been working to increase the number of interns working on these projects by increasing the number of hosts and available grants, as well as connecting with other labs, departments, and centers across MIT to support students’ global experiences.

      For the first time this year, MISTI developed pre-departure sessions intended to help students reflect on their experiences in the wider context of sustainability and climate change. Around 90 students were invited to participate in a Canvas course and an in-person session with guest speakers. In the Canvas session, students were asked to calculate the carbon footprint of their flight to their MISTI destination and compare the results to other common daily activities. Four out of five of them expressed that the level of emissions from their flights was higher, or much higher, than they previously thought. Half of the students expressed that this was the first time they thought about their flight emissions for the summer. The students were then directed to the MIT Climate Portal website and asked to reflect on the impact of carbon dioxide emissions on the climate and the effects of climate change on economically developing countries. The Canvas exercise concluded with readings and reflections on what can be done to address the climate crisis.

      The in-person session featured David Hsu, associate professor of urban and environmental planning and co-chair of the Campus Fast Forward working group on climate education, who presented his research and work on flight emissions. He emphasized the high impact of aviation on carbon dioxide emissions and how emissions are unevenly distributed on a global scale, based on income levels and per capita bases. A small group of travelers account for most of the emissions, which is also true in academic settings where a small number of travelers have a much higher carbon footprint. Hsu also explained the School of Architecture and Planning climate action plan and how it addresses faculty and student travel. “I know it’s hard. If we at MIT want to be leaders in this area, talking about it is not enough,” he said. “We have to act. We cannot be models just by doing research; we have to be role models at all levels. Faculty, staff, and students have to change their flight habits.”

      Having completed the climate and sustainability training, Favianna Colón Irizarry, a rising second-year majoring in chemical and biological engineering, explains, “to minimize our carbon footprint, we are taught to eat consciously and use environmentally friendly products. What we are not taught is that this alone will not make a difference; we ought to sacrifice more, like flying selectively and meaningfully, to truly make an impact. MISTI’s Climate and Sustainability helped me recognize this, as well as prepare me for how I choose to proceed in my future green endeavors.”

      Also during the session, rising seniors Anushree Chaudhuri and Melissa Stok, the leads for the MIT Student Sustainability Coalition, presented their work around coordinating efforts among students and the vast landscape of groups, organizations, and entities at the Institute. They invited all interested students to join and reach out to any of the entities that could be a good fit for their interests. Chaudhuri reflected afterwards, “Sustainability is inherently interdisciplinary. Every MIT student can incorporate sustainability into their work, regardless of major, class year, or interests! I was excited to join my SSC co-lead, Melissa, in speaking with a diverse group of MISTI interns about how to explore sustainability-related academic, extracurricular, professional, and experiential opportunities at MIT and beyond. These students come from many different disciplines, so it was incredibly heartening to hear that they are all pursuing a climate-related project abroad this summer.”

      Eduardo Rivera, MISTI’s coordinator for climate and sustainability expressed that “educational experiences abroad are a fundamental part of MIT’s mission to foster global leaders to tackle the climate crisis. This summer, more than 110 students will be working around the world in solar and wind technologies, carbon capture, climate adaptation and urban planning, sustainable concrete, electric mobility, among others. We are using this opportunity to expand on the reflection part of the experiential learning cycle. The goal of these pre-departure sessions is to raise awareness and help our students reflect on the impact of their everyday activities on the climate, and to also give them resources to learn and act thoughtfully. We hope they will not only become conscious travelers, but also agents for change.”

      “This year’s climate and sustainability pre-departure training were pilot sessions, and the goal is to expand this learning experience to all MISTI students, not just those working in the fields of climate and sustainability. This will be a unique opportunity to raise awareness and expand the knowledge to over 1,000 of our students as they travel to more than 40 countries across the globe,” explains Abby MacKenzie, MIT-India coordinator who co-developed the pre-departure sessions. More

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      in Environment

      MIT engineering students take on the heat of Miami

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      Think back to the last time you had to wait for a bus. How miserable were you? If you were in Boston, your experience might have included punishing wind and icy sleet — or, more recently, a punch of pollen straight to the sinuses. But in Florida’s Miami-Dade County, where the effects of climate change are both drastic and intensifying, commuters have to contend with an entirely different set of challenges: blistering temperatures and scorching humidity, making long stints waiting in the sun nearly unbearable.

      One of Miami’s most urgent transportation needs is shared by car-clogged Boston: coaxing citizens to use the municipal bus network, rather than the emissions-heavy individual vehicles currently contributing to climate change. But buses can be a tough sell in a sunny city where humidity hovers between 60 and 80 percent year-round. 

      Enter MIT’s Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (EECS) and the MIT Priscilla King Gray (PKG) Public Service Center. The result of close collaboration between the two organizations, class 6.900 (Engineering For Impact) challenges EECS students to apply their engineering savvy to real-world problems beyond the MIT campus.

      This spring semester, the real-world problem was heat. 

      Miami-Dade County Department of Transportation and Public Works Chief Innovation Officer Carlos Cruz-Casas explains: “We often talk about the city we want to live in, about how the proper mix of public transportation, on-demand transit, and other mobility solutions, such as e-bikes and e-scooters, could help our community live a car-light life. However, none of this will be achievable if the riders are not comfortable when doing so.” 

      “When people think of South Florida and climate change, they often think of sea level rise,” says Juan Felipe Visser, deputy director of equity and engagement within the Office of the Mayor in Miami-Dade. “But heat really is the silent killer. So the focus of this class, on heat at bus stops, is very apt.” With little tree cover to give relief at some of the hottest stops, Miami-Dade commuters cluster in tiny patches of shade behind bus stops, sometimes giving up when the heat becomes unbearable. 

      A more conventional electrical engineering course might use temperature monitoring as an abstract example, building sample monitors in isolation and grading them as a merely academic exercise. But Professor Joel Volman, EECS faculty head of electrical engineering, and Joe Steinmeyer, senior lecturer in EECS, had something more impactful in mind.

      “Miami-Dade has a large population of people who are living in poverty, undocumented, or who are otherwise marginalized,” says Voldman. “Waiting, sometimes for a very long time, in scorching heat for the bus is just one aspect of how a city population can be underserved, but by measuring patterns in how many people are waiting for a bus, how long they wait, and in what conditions, we can begin to see where services are not keeping up with demand.”

      Only after that gap is quantified can the work of city and transportation planners begin, Cruz-Casas explains: “We needed to quantify the time riders are exposed to extreme heat and prioritize improvements, including on-time performance improvements, increasing service frequency, or looking to enhance the tree canopy near the bus stop.” 

      Quantifying that time — and the subjective experience of the wait — proved tricky, however. With over 7,500 bus stops along 101 bus routes, Miami-Dade’s transportation network presents a considerable data-collection challenge. A network of physical temperature monitors could be useful, but only if it were carefully calibrated to meet the budgetary, environmental, privacy, and implementation requirements of the city. But how do you work with city officials — not to mention all of bus-riding Miami — from over 2,000 miles away? 

      This is where the PKG Center comes in. “We are a hub and a connector and facilitator of best practices,” explains Jill Bassett, associate dean and director of the center, who worked with Voldman and Steinmeyer to find a municipal partner organization for the course. “We bring knowledge of current pedagogy around community-engaged learning, which includes: help with framing a partnership that centers community-identified concerns and is mutually beneficial; identifying and learning from a community partner; talking through ways to build in opportunities for student learners to reflect on power dynamics, reciprocity, systems thinking, long-term planning, continuity, ethics, all the types of things that come up with this kind of shared project.”

      Through a series of brainstorming conversations, Bassett helped Voldman and Steinmeyer structure a well-defined project plan, as Cruz-Casas weighed in on the county’s needed technical specifications (including affordability, privacy protection, and implementability).

      “This course brings together a lot of subject area experts,” says Voldman. “We brought in guest lecturers, including Abby Berenson from the Sloan Leadership Center, to talk about working in teams; engineers from BOSE to talk about product design, certification, and environmental resistance; the co-founder and head of engineering from MIT spinout Butlr to talk about their low-power occupancy sensor; Tony Hu from MIT IDM [Integrated Design and Management] to talk about industrial design; and Katrina LaCurts from EECS to talk about communications and networking.”

      With the support of two generous donations and a gift of software from Altium, 6.900 developed into a hands-on exercise in hardware/software product development with a tangible goal in sight: build a better bus monitor.

      The challenges involved in this undertaking became apparent as soon as the 6.900 students began designing their monitors. “The most challenging requirement to meet was that the monitor be able to count how many people were waiting — and for how long they’d been standing there — while still maintaining privacy,” says Fabian Velazquez ’23 a recent EECS graduate. The task was complicated by commuters’ natural tendency to stand where the shade goes — whether beneath a tree or awning or snaking against a nearby wall in a line — rather than directly next to the bus sign or inside the bus shelter. “Accurately measuring people count with a camera — the most straightforward choice — is already quite difficult since you have to incorporate machine learning to identify which objects in frame are people. Maintaining privacy added an extra layer of constraint … since there is no guarantee the collected data wouldn’t be vulnerable.”

      As the groups weighed various privacy-preserving options, including lidar, radar, and thermal imaging, the class realized that Wi-Fi “sniffers,” which count the number of Wi-Fi enabled signals in the immediate area, were their best option to count waiting passengers. “We were all excited and ready for this amazing, answer-to-all-our-problems radar sensor to count people,” says Velasquez. “That component was extremely complex, however, and the complexity would have ultimately made my team use a lot of time and resources to integrate with our system. We also had a short time-to-market for this system we developed. We made the trade-off of complexity for robustness.” 

      The weather also posed its own set of challenges. “Environmental conditions were big factors on the structure and design of our devices,” says Yong Yan (Crystal) Liang, a rising junior majoring in EECS. “We incorporated humidity and temperature sensors into our data to show the weather at individual stops. Additionally, we also considered how our enclosure may be affected by extreme heat or potential hurricanes.”

      The heat variable proved problematic in multiple ways. “People detection was especially difficult, for in the Miami heat, thermal cameras may not be able to distinguish human body temperature from the surrounding air temperature, and the glare of the sun off of other surfaces in the area makes most forms of imaging very buggy,” says Katherine Mohr ’23. “My team had considered using mmWave sensors to get around these constraints, but we found the processing to be too difficult, and (like the rest of the class), we decided to only move forward with Wi-Fi/BLE [Bluetooth Low Energy] sniffers.”

      The most valuable component of the new class may well have been the students’ exposure to real-world hardware/software engineering product development, where limitations on time and budget always exist, and where client requests must be carefully considered.  “Having an actual client to work with forced us to learn how to turn their wants into more specific technical specifications,” says Mohr. “We chose deliverables each week to complete by Friday, prioritizing tasks which would get us to a minimum viable product, as well as tasks that would require extra manufacturing time, like designing the printed-circuit board and enclosure.”

      Play video

      Joel Voldman, who co-designed 6.900 (Engineering For Impact) with Joe Steinmeyer and MIT’s Priscilla King Gray (PKG) Public Service Center, describes how the course allowed students help develop systems for the public good. Voldman is the winner of the 2023 Teaching with Digital Technology Award, which is co-sponsored by MIT Open Learning and the Office of the Vice Chancellor. Video: MIT Open Learning

      Crystal Liang counted her conversations with city representatives as among her most valuable 6.900 experiences. “We generated a lot of questions and were able to communicate with the community leaders of this project from Miami-Dade, who made time to answer all of them and gave us ideas from the goals they were trying to achieve,” she reports. “This project gave me a new perspective on problem-solving because it taught me to see things from the community members’ point of view.” Some of those community leaders, including Marta Viciedo, co-founder of Transit Alliance Miami, joined the class’s final session on May 16 to review the students’ proposed solutions. 

      The students’ thoughtful approach paid off when it was time to present the heat monitors to the class’s client. In a group conference call with Miami-Dade officials toward the end of the semester, the student teams shared their findings and the prototypes they’d created, along with videos of the devices at work. Juan Felipe Visser was among those in attendance. “This is a lot of work,” he told the students following their presentation. “So first of all, thank you for doing that, and for presenting to us. I love the concept. I took the bus this morning, as I do every morning, and was battered by the sun and the heat. So I personally appreciated the focus.” 

      Cruz-Casas agreed: “I am pleasantly surprised by the diverse approach the students are taking. We presented a challenge, and they have responded to it and managed to think beyond the problem at hand. I’m very optimistic about how the outcomes of this project will have a long-lasting impact for our community. At a minimum, I’m thinking that the more awareness we raise about this topic, the more opportunities we have to have the brightest minds seeking for a solution.”

      The creators of 6.900 agree, and hope that their class helps more MIT engineers to broaden their perspective on the meaning and application of their work. 

      “We are really excited about students applying their skills within a real-world, complex environment that will impact real people,” says Bassett. “We are excited that they are learning that it’s not just the design of technology that matters, but that climate; environment and built environment; and issues around socioeconomics, race, and equity, all come into play. There are layers and layers to the creation and deployment of technology in a demographically diverse multilingual community that is at the epicenter of climate change.” More

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      in Environment

      Preparing Colombia’s cities for life amid changing forests

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      It was an uncharacteristically sunny morning as Marcela Angel MCP ’18, flanked by a drone pilot from the Boston engineering firm AirWorks and a data collection team from the Colombian regional environmental agency Corpoamazonia, climbed a hill in the Andes Mountains of southwest Colombia. The area’s usual mountain cloud cover — one of the major challenges to working with satellite imagery or flying UAVs (unpiloted aerial vehicles, or drones) in the Pacific highlands of the Amazon — would roll through in the hours to come. But for now, her team had chosen a good day to hike out for their first flight. Angel is used to long travel for her research. Raised in Bogotá, she maintained strong ties to Colombia throughout her master’s program in the MIT Department of Urban Studies and Planning (DUSP). Her graduate thesis, examining Bogotá’s management of its public green space, took her regularly back to her hometown, exploring how the city could offer residents more equal access to the clean air, flood protection and day-to-day health and social benefits provided by parks and trees. But the hill she was hiking this morning, outside the remote city of Mocoa, had taken an especially long time to climb: five years building relationships with the community of Mocoa and the Colombian government, recruiting project partners, and navigating the bureaucracy of bringing UAVs into the country. Now, her team finally unwrapped their first, knee-high drone from its tarp and set it carefully in the grass. Under the gathering gray clouds, the buzz of its rotors joined the hum of insects in the trees, and the machine at last took to the skies.

      From Colombia to Cambridge

      “I actually grew up on the last street before the eastern mountains reserve,” Angel says of her childhood in Bogotá. “I’ve always been at that border between city and nature.” This idea, that urban areas are married to the ecosystems around them, would inform Angel’s whole education and career. Before coming to MIT, she studied architecture at Bogotá’s Los Andes University; for her graduation project she proposed a plan to resettle an informal neighborhood on Bogotá’s outskirts to minimize environmental risks to its residents. Among her projects at MIT was an initiative to spatially analyze Bogotá’s tree canopy, providing data for the city to plan a tree-planting program as a strategy to give vulnerable populations in the city more access to nature. And she was naturally intrigued when Colombia’s former minister of environment and sustainable development came to MIT in 2017 to give a guest presentation to the DUSP master’s program. The minister, Luis Gilberto Murillo (now the Colombian ambassador to the United States), introduced the students to the challenges triggered by a recent disaster in the city of Mocoa, on the border between the lowland Amazon and the Andes Mountains. Unprecedented rainstorms had destabilized the surrounding forests, and that April a devastating flood and landslide had killed hundreds of people and destroyed entire neighborhoods. And as climate change contributed to growing rainfall in the region, the risks of more landslide events were rising. Murillo provided useful insights into how city planning decisions had contributed to the crisis. But he also asked for MIT’s support addressing future landslide risks in the area. Angel and Juan Camilo Osorio, a PhD candidate at DUSP, decided to take up the challenge, and in January 2018 and 2019, a research delegation from MIT traveled to Colombia for a newly-created graduate course. Returning once again to Bogotá, Angel interviewed government agencies and nonprofits to understand the state of landslide monitoring and public policy. In Mocoa, further interviews and a series of workshops helped clarify what locals needed most and what MIT could provide: better information on where and when landslides might strike, and a process to increase risk awareness and involve traditionally marginalized groups in decision-making processes around that risk. Over the coming year, a core team formed to put the insights from this trip into action, including Angel, Osorio, postdoc Norhan Bayomi of the MIT Environmental Solutions Initiative (ESI) and MIT Professor John Fernández, director of the ESI and one of Angel’s mentors at DUSP. After a second visit to Mocoa that brought into the fold Indigenous groups, environmental agencies, and the national army, a plan was formed: MIT would partner with Corpoamazonia and build a network of community researchers to deploy and test drone technology and machine learning models to monitor the mountain forests for both landslide risks and signs of forest health, while implementing a participatory planning process with residents. “What our projects aim to do is give the communities new tools to continue protecting and restoring the forest,” says Angel, “and support new and inclusive development models, even in the face of new challenges.”

      Lifelines for the climate

      The goal of tropical forest conservation is an urgent one. As forests are cut down, their trees and soils release carbon they have stored over millennia, adding huge amounts of heat-trapping carbon dioxide to the atmosphere. Deforestation, mainly in the tropics, is now estimated to contribute more to climate change than any country besides the United States and China — and once lost, tropical forests are exceptionally hard to restore. “Tropical forests should be a natural way to slow and reverse climate change,” says Angel. “And they can be. But today, we are reaching critical tipping points where it is just the opposite.” This became the motivating force for Angel’s career after her graduation. In 2019, Fernández invited her to join the ESI and lead a new Natural Climate Solutions Program, with the Mocoa project as its first centerpiece. She quickly mobilized the partners to raise funding for the project from the Global Environmental Facility and the CAF Development Bank of Latin America and the Caribbean, and recruited additional partners including MIT Lincoln Laboratories, AirWorks, and the Pratt Institute, where Osorio had become an assistant professor. She hired machine learning specialists from MIT to begin design on UAVs’ data processing, and helped assemble a local research network in Mocoa to increase risk awareness, promote community participation, and better understand what information city officials and community groups needed for city planning and conservation. “This is the amazing thing about MIT,” she says. “When you study a problem here, you’re not just playing in a sandbox. Everyone I’ve worked with is motivated by the complexity of the technical challenge and the opportunity for meaningful engagement in Mocoa, and hopefully in many more places besides.” At the same time, Angel created opportunities for the next generation of MIT graduate students to follow in her footsteps. With Fernández and Bayomi, she created a new course, 4.S23 (Biodiversity and Cities), in which students traveled to Colombia to develop urban planning strategies for the cities of Quidbó and Leticia, located in carbon-rich and biodiverse areas. The course has been taught twice, with Professor Gabriella Carolini joining the teaching team for spring 2023, and has already led to a student report to city officials in Quidbó recommending ways to enhance biodiversity and adapt to climate change as the city grows, a multi-stakeholder partnership to train local youth and implement a citizen-led biodiversity survey, and a seed grant from the MIT Climate and Sustainability Consortium to begin providing both cities detailed data on their tree cover derived from satellite images. “These regions face serious threats, especially on a warming planet, but many of the solutions for climate change, biodiversity conservation, and environmental equity in the region go hand-in-hand,” Angel says. “When you design a city to use fewer resources, to contribute less to climate change, it also causes less pressure on the environment around it. When you design a city for equity and quality of life, you’re giving attention to its green spaces and what they can provide for people and as habitat for other species. When you protect and restore forests, you’re protecting local bioeconomies.”

      Bringing the data home

      Meanwhile, in Mocoa, Angel’s original vision is taking flight. With the team’s test flights behind them, they can now begin creating digital models of the surrounding area. Regular drone flights and soil samples will fill in changing information about trees, water, and local geology, allowing the project’s machine learning specialists to identify warning signs for future landslides and extreme weather events. More importantly, there is now an established network of local community researchers and leaders ready to make use of this information. With feedback from their Mocoan partners, Angel’s team has built a prototype of the online platform they will use to share their UAV data; they’re now letting Mocoa residents take it for a test drive and suggest how it can be made more user-friendly. Her visit this January also paved the way for new projects that will tie the Environmental Solutions Initiative more tightly to Mocoa. With her project partners, Angel is exploring developing a course to teach local students how to use UAVs like the ones her team is flying. She is also considering expanded efforts to collect the kind of informal knowledge of Mocoa, on the local ecology and culture, that people everywhere use in making their city planning and emergency response decisions, but that is rarely codified and included in scientific risk analyses. It’s a great deal of work to offer this one community the tools to adapt successfully to climate change. But even with all the robotics and machine learning models in the world, this close, slow-unfolding engagement, grounded in trust and community inclusion, is what it takes to truly prepare people to confront profound changes in their city and environment. “Protecting natural carbon sinks is a global socio-environmental challenge, and one where it is not enough for MIT to just contribute to the knowledge base or develop a new technology,” says Angel. “But we can help mobilize decision-makers and nontraditional actors, and design more inclusive and technology-enhanced processes, to make this easier for the people who have lifelong stakes in these ecosystems. That is the vision.” More