Urban studies and planning

Research Associate Awad Abdelhalim found that 46 per cent of the miles traveled by Waymo between August 2023 and December 2025 in California were ‘deadhead’ miles, where the vehicle traveled without a passenger, reports the Financial Times’ Kana Inagaki, Megan Snaith and Jim Pickard. Abdelhalim says, “the findings showed that — like human-driven taxis — Waymos were on the road more than the average private car,” Inagaki, Snaith, and Pickard write. “[A]s robotaxi fleets scale up, this could become an issue that needs to be addressed [in the UK], said Abdelhalim.” 

In a Financial Times opinion piece, Prof. Carlo Ratti discusses alternatives to implementing traditional air conditioning systems, which move rather than reduce heat, that could be used in Europe as temperatures continue to rise. “The best answer, then, is a mixed system, co-ordinated in real time, with sensors to track temperature, occupancy and demand, and algorithms deciding when to produce, store and distribute cooling in step with the electricity grid,” writes Ratti. 

The Boston Globe’s Mark Feeney chronicles MIT’s adaptive reuse of the historic Metropolitan Warehouse into the new home of the School of Architecture and Planning. “As spaces, our studios used to be a lot more like labs, but now they are grand and full of light and celebratory in a way that hopefully enables better work,” says Prof. Ana Miljački, Head of the Department of Architecture.  

Dezeen’s Ellen Eberhardt describes how the renovation of the historic Metropolitan Warehouse, the new home of MIT’s School of Architecture and Planning, maintains “details such as the building's fortress-like corner towers and crenellated corbeled cornices, while punching new windows into its two-foot-thick walls.” Eberhardt highlights how “the project included careful ‘cutting strategies’ and the application of new support systems to shift existing loads within the building to make room for modern academic spaces such as studios and makerspaces.”  

For The Architect’s Newspaper, reporter Fred A. Bernstein details the renovation of the Metropolitan Warehouse, the new home of MIT’s School of Architecture and Planning, transforming the fortress-like storage warehouse into “light-filled classrooms and studios.” The building is “going to be a living laboratory and a teaching tool for generations of students,” shares Prof. John Ochsendorf. “Twenty years ago, MIT took me inside and asked if I could see a way to reuse the building. And I said, ‘Absolutely not.’ It was hard to imagine it could be as open and light-filled as it is. That took heroics.” 

In a “radical example of adaptive reuse” and a reimagining of a historic Cambridge landmark, MIT has transformed the Metropolitan Storage Warehouse into the new home of the School of Architecture and Planning, bringing together MIT’s architecture and design programs into one connected academic hub, reports Boston Business Journal reporter Maya Shavit. “There will be new installations and new manifestations of our students’ creativity every single week,” explains Prof. John Ochsendorf. “That’s unpredictable and messy, but it’s also part of the fun of being at a place like MIT where people are constantly inventing the future.”

In a Los Angeles Times opinion piece, Prof. Carlo Ratti and contributor Mario Carpo make the case that AI is built to imitate human creativity and is less capable of original design. “In a profession that defines itself through invention, GenAI increasingly is seen less as a creative genius and more as a ‘stochastic parrot’ — a term introduced in 2021 by leading AI researchers to describe a technology that learns to repeat the most likely sequences found in whatever data it’s been shown,” write Ratti and Carpo. 

Prof. Daniela Rus, director of CSAIL, joins Hakeem Oluseyi, host of GBH’s “Particles of Thought,” to discuss the lab’s work utilizing AI to enhance robots’ ability to move, reason, and act like humans. “The objective is to bring AI’s ability to understand text, images, and other online information to make physical machines intelligent, and if we achieve this then AI will not just reside in our computers—it will drive, it will walk it will fly, it will interact with us in the physical world.” 

In an opinion piece for the Boston Globe, Research Scientist Jim Aliosi advocates for reliable public bus service along Blue Hill Avenue in Boston’s Mattapan neighborhood. “Each day more than 30,000 riders use one of the bus routes using Blue Hill Avenue, and each day they collectively lose 3,000 hours of precious time due to traffic congestion and impediments like double parking,” writes Aliosi, “Bus rapid transit will change all that in this decade.”  

Writing for the Financial Times, Prof. Carlo Ratti makes the case that “the answer to imperfect peer review is better peer review, not political supervision.” Ratti shares: “Replacing scientific judgment with political alignment risks undermining the very engine of discovery. Faced with the risk that a project could be cancelled when the political weather turns, the rational researcher abandons the ambitious idea for the safe one.” 

Prof. Jinhua Zhao takes a car ride through Boston with GBH “Curiosity Desk” host Edgar B. Herwick II to discuss the concerns and benefits of self-driving technology entering the city. “We pay a lot of attention to how good AV [Autonomous Vehicle] safety needs to be, but it’s important for us to understand how bad we have been—the current system is [bad],” says Zhao. “When human drivers are aggressive, they actually indeed pose a challenge on AV—which is that AV needs to learn how to be assertive. If you’re too conservative, you’ll just be stuck there going nowhere.”

In a New York Times opinion piece, Prof. Carlo Ratti examines the debate around Ferrari’s first electric vehicle (EV) and the future of EV self-driving technology. “The self-driving technology available in most EVs turns the car into something summoned on demand,” writes Ratti. “Our work at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology suggests that autonomous driving could allow cities to operate with a small fraction of today’s vehicles while reducing parking demand by as much as 85 percent.”

In the first installment of his Wallpaper series on ordinary objects that define daily life, Prof. Carlo Ratti describes the origins of the mosquito coil, a spiral shaped insect repellent, and its cultural significance as a ‘zampirone,’ during Italian summers. Named after its 19^th century creator Giovanni Battista Zampironi, the zampirone represents “typically Italian technology: the technology of compromise,” writes Ratti. “We might also say that the zampirone is a typically Italian technology: the technology of compromise. It does not build a barrier, but creates a temporary condition of habitability.”

Writing for Bloomberg, Prof. Simon Johnson and Prof. Elisabeth Reynolds describe how the U.S. can maintain its technological leadership by investing in research focused on critical minerals, semiconductors, biotechnology, quantum computing, drones and advanced manufacturing.  “Invention is important, but technological leadership in the 21st century will go to the country that adopts these new ideas rapidly and applies them in clever ways,” Johnson and Reynolds write. “And that will require the U.S. to build vibrant innovation and industrial ecosystems that adopt and diffuse new technologies, including AI.”

Prof. Kate Brown speaks with Zoe Matthews of GBH about growing interest in urban gardening. Matthews highlights Brown’s course about cooperative agriculture at MIT, during which “her students produced an accessible how-to guide on starting an urban farm.”