This week, reports Orhan Ayyüce, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology announced the launch of "a major new research center focused on the planning, design, construction and retrofitting of urban environments for the 21st century."
"We have entered into a new era or urban growth whereby the rules have changed and paradigms of urbanism desperately need recalibration to meet today’s global challenges." says the Mission statement of MIT's new Center for Advanced Urbanism (CAU).
Led by Alexander D'Hooghe, Director, and Alan Berger, Director of Research, "The MIT Center for Advanced Urbanism’s objective is to become the world’s pre-eminent cultural center about the design of metropolitan environments, by articulating methods and projects to integrate separate disciplinary agendas in architecture, landscape, ecology, transportation engineering, politics and political philosophy, technology and real estate through a most eloquent design culture on scales ranging from the complex infrastructural intersection, to that of a neighborhood, on to the scale of an entire regional system."
"With its distinguished history in urbanism, reaching all the way back to the work of pioneering urbanist Kevin Lynch, the MIT School of Architecture + Planning is well positioned to lead this effort, drawing faculty from both the department of architecture and of urban studies and planning," adds Ayyüce.
FULL STORY: MIT launches new research center on advanced urbanism
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