The world is experiencing a period of extreme urbanization.

In China alone, 300 million rural inhabitants will move to urban

areas over the next 15 years. This will require building an
infrastructure equivalent to the one housing the entire
population of the United States in a matter of a few decades.
In the future, cities will account for nearly 90% of global population
growth, 80% of wealth creation, and 60% of total energy
consumption. Developing better strategies for the creation of new
cities, is therefore, a global imperative.
Our need to improve our understanding of cities, however, is
pressed not only by the social relevance of urban environments, but
also by the availability of new strategies for city-scale interventions
that are enabled by emerging technologies. Leveraging advances
in data analysis, sensor technologies, and urban experiments,
City Science will provide new insights into creating a data-driven
approach to urban design and planning. Our future cities will
desperately need such understanding.

Why the City Science Initiative at

the MIT Media Lab?
The City Science Initiative at the MIT Media Lab is a unique network
of research groups experienced in the design of technology and
infrastructure, the analysis of big data, and the development of
rigorous scientific theories. The City Science Initiative at the MIT
Media Lab provides an interdisciplinary nexus where these research
networks join to improve the design, livability and understanding
of high performance urban environments.
We are seeking strategic partners from industry and government
to develop targeted research projects and living lab deployments
around the themes of urban design, mobility-on-demand, energy,
big data, responsive technologies, and integrated live-work
environments.
Our mission is to develop urban strategies that can result in:
100x
10x
5x
2x

Reduction in CO2 emissions

Reduction in traffic congestion
Improvement in livability
Improvement in creativity

http://cities.media.mit.edu

WD1880_MIT_MLCS_Brchr.indd 1

an initiative of
the MIT Media Lab

Why Cities?

C I T Y SC I E N CE

MIT MEDIA LAB

City Science Leadership Team
Kent Larson, Co-Director and Advisory Board
Alex 'Sandy' Pentland, Co-Director and Advisory Board
Cesar A. Hidalgo, Co-Director and Advisory Board
Ryan Chin, Managing Director
Joi Ito, Advisory Board Member
Nicholas Negroponte, Innovation Advisor

Affiliated Research Groups at the Media Lab

Changing Places: How new strategies for architectural design, mobility
systems, and networked intelligence can enable dynamic, evolving places
that respond to the complexities of life.
Kent Larson
Human Dynamics: How social networks can influence our lives in business,
health, and governance, as well as technology adoption and diffusion.
Alex Sandy Pentland
Civic Media: How to create technical and social systems to allow
communities to share, understand, and act on civic information.
Ethan Zuckerman
Macro Connections: How to transform data into knowledge.
Cesar A. Hidalgo
Responsive Environments: How sensor networks augment and mediate
human experience, interaction, and perception.
Joseph A. Paradiso
Social Computing: How to meaningfully connect people with information.
Sepandar Kamvar
Viral Spaces: How to make scalable networks that merge the distant with
the physically nearby.
Andrew Lippman
For additional information, please contact:
Ryan Chin, PhD
Managing Director, City Science Initiative
MIT Media Lab
617.253.6828 (office)
617.319.0778 (mobile)
rchin@media.mit.edu

http://cities.media.mit.edu

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CITY SCIENCE

Research Themes

1
City Science Methodology
The current methods of city design date back to the 1800s,
when engineers and city planners developed centralized
networks to deliver drinking water, food, and energy. Similarly
structured centralized networks were designed to facilitate
transportation and remove waste.
These century-old solutions, however, are becoming
increasingly obsolete. Modern cities designed around the
private automobile, with single-function zoning, are becoming
more congested, polluted, and unsafe. Citizens are spending
more of their valuable time commuting, and communities are
becoming increasingly detached. Many modern cities simply
do not function properly.
Rather than separate systems by function - water, food,
waste, transport, education, energy - we must consider them
holistically. Instead of focusing only on access and distribution
systems, our cities need dynamic, networked, self-regulating
systems that take into account complex interactions. In
short, to ensure a sustainable future society, we must deploy
emerging technologies to create a nervous system for cities
that supports the stability of their government, energy,
mobility, work, and public health networks.

The Cellular City

Compact, diverse, walkable and attractive cities are a luxury,
but they should not be. The City Science Initiative at the MIT
Media Lab is exploring technologies to help develop cities
that facilitate the creation of desirable urban features, such as
shared electric vehicles, adaptable living environments, and
flexible work spaces.
Our goal is to design urban cells that are compact enough to
be walkable and foster casual interactions, without sacrificing
connectivity to their larger urban surroundings. These cells
must be sufficiently autonomous and provide resiliency,
consistent functionality, and elegant urban design. Most
importantly, the cellular city must be highly adaptable so it
can respond dynamically to changes in the structure of its
economic and social activities.

WD1880_MIT_MLCS_Brchr.indd 2

URBAN ANALYTICS
AND MODELING

Urban Analytics focuses on

data-driven analyses of economic
activity, urban perception, human
behavior, mobility patterns,
and resource consumption to
inform the city design process.
Parametric urban design tools and
computer simulations will enable
the creation of rapid prototyping
platforms for the placement of
mobility nodes, street typologies,
and resource allocation.
Targeted interventions for existing
cities and phasing strategies for
the development of new cities
will be generated in an evidencebased fashion, influenced by the
findings of living laboratory
experiments, and sophisticated
data analysis. Projects include:
Data-driven analysis of
economic activity, human
behavior, mobility patterns,
resource consumption, etc. in
order to inform evidence-based
and experimentally validated
processes for designing new
cities
Parametric urban design
tools to schematically define
mobility nodes, streets, building
massing, and location of
resources, to create nested
compact urban cells (walkable
neighborhoods)

INCENTIVES AND
GOVERNANCE

In most cities, urban services are

poorly distributed and require
significant effort to maintain and
upkeep. Projects in this theme
will address the creation of new,
network-centric methods for
managing reactive urban systems.
This includes the prototyping of
persuasive interfaces that provide
dynamic incentives for rebalancing
of shared-use systems, and replacing
the traditional one-size-fits-all urban
service strategy with flexible options.
These new models will be influenced
by crowd-sourced intelligence and
respond in real-time to the needs of
urban residents. Urban-scale serious
games can provide targeted
incentives for city dwellers to alter
their consumption patterns and
shape use of resources such as
shared-used mobility, variablerate electricity, and flexible/timeshared workspaces. New portals for
information dissemination through
mobile applications and web-based
interfaces will improve transparency
in governance and accessibility of
information. Projects include:
New network-centric methods for
managing reactive, data-driven
city systems
Replace one-size-fits-all systems
with exchange networks in order
to obtain more stable, fair, and
socially efficient services

Urban energy, mobility, water,

food, and waste simulator for
efficient, post-oil cities

Dynamic incentives for rebalancing shared-use and

interacting systems

Typology generation of
streetscapes, pathways,
mobility nodes, and responsive
technology for cities

Urban-scale serious games to

shape use of resources such as
shared-used mobility, variable-rate
power, and flexible workspaces

MOBILITY NETWORKS

Modern trip planners have

dramatically improved the
multi-modal transit experience for
millions of urban commuters, but
they are often limited to a select few
modes such as driving, walking, and
public transit. Projects in this theme
include the development of a
sophisticated multi-modal mobility
recommendation engine that ties
together a variety of modes, from
carpooling to bike sharing, and is
influenced by real-time data such as
weather patterns, traffic, and past
user behavior. New urban vehicles
including electric scooters, cars,
and compact bike-lane vehicles are
being designed and prototyped at
the MIT Media Lab. Existing vehicle
prototypes and vehicle-pedestrian
interfaces for autonomous cars can
offer a powerful platform for
user-centric autonomous vehicle
research. Improved public
infrastructure for shared electric
vehicles such as integrated charging
and locking technology will
reduce vehicle rental/drop-off
time and dramatically improve user
experience. Similarly, persuasive
interfaces for shared-use vehicle
systems can encourage mode-shift
and positive mobility patterns for
health. Projects include:
Multi-modal mobility
recommendation engines
New urban vehicles including
electric scooters, automobiles,
bike-lane vehicles, etc.
Autonomous vehicle technology
and vehicle-pedestrian interfaces
Charging and locking technology
for shared-use vehicle systems
Interfaces for shared-use vehicle
systems, including proactive,
persuasive systems

PLACES OF LIVING
AND WORK

ELECTRONIC AND
SOCIAL NETWORKS

The nature of work is changing

dramatically with the ubiquity of
mobile devices and Internet
connectivity. The traditional office
building is rapidly becoming
obsolete as a place for personal
work. Boundaries between home
and the workplace are dissolving
rapidly, spurred by advanced
computation and synchronous and
asynchronous communication.
The design and prototyping of
personalized, transformable urban
housing will enable city dwellers to
maximize the functionality of small
apartments, thereby improving
livability and convenience.
Time-shifted, shared space-ondemand for collaborative work
will allow for face to face meetings
while giving businesses the
opportunity to reduce their office
space requirements and lower
net energy consumption. The
integration of modular, personalized
hydroponic and aeroponic urban
farming systems will give urban
residents the opportunity to
grow their own food and improve
transparency of our incredibly
complex food supply chain. Projects
include:

Social networks enable the instant

proliferation of ideas and events.
Some have even contributed
to sociopolitical movement
and revolutions. Projects in this
theme will explore electronic
nervous systems, from the scale
of the human body to the city.
These decentralized electronic
and social networks can form the
basis for new patterns of learning,
recreation, production, and health.
They can provide pathways for
people to communicate with
their private and public worlds.
To reach its full potential, an
interlinked system of trust
networks, that provide security
through data encryption and
biometric technologies, must be
developed. These trust networks
ensure privacy for otherwise
invasive systems that make use
of highly personal data such
as mobility patterns, resource
consumption (food, water, energy),
and individualized health profiles.
Projects include:

Personalized, transformable
urban housing

Decentralized, contextualized,
and social forms of
communication to transform
patterns of learning, recreation,
production, and health

Time-shifted, shared space-ondemand for collaborative work

Modular, personalized
hydroponic and aeroponic
urban farming
Sensing and algorithms to
understand fine-grained
human activity for responsive
lighting, HVAC, health,
energy conservation, and
communication in the home and
workplace

Electronic nervous systems, from

the scale of the human body to
the city

Trust networks to provide

security and ensure privacy for
otherwise invasive systems that
make use of person activity data

ENERGY NETWORKS

New technologies for smart grids

and intelligent metering can
enable urban energy networks
that dynamically respond to
human mobility and behavior
patterns. Today, networked
demand response systems
can reduce peak loading on
our aging electric grids but
the integration of renewable
energy sources is still difficult
due to intermittency. Projects
in this theme will focus on the
exploration of DC microgrids
for compact urban cells that
incorporate localized renewable
energy generation sources such
as rooftop photovoltaics and
microturbines. These local DC
power networks can reduce
AC/DC conversion losses in
residential buildings and provide
direct connections between
intermittent sources, loads, and
battery-based energy storage.
New technologies for energy
storage will be investigated in
depth, including business and
service models for repurposing
second-life automobile batteries
for grid energy storage and
buffering rapid charging of
electric vehicles. Projects include:
Dynamic smart grids that
respond to human mobility
and behavior patterns
DC electricity microgrids for
powering compact urban cells
with renewable energy
Second-life automotive
batteries for energy buffering
and vehicle rapid charging
Fully DC power networks for
residential buildings

9/27/12 11:21 AM