Massachusetts Institute of Technology

MIT/China Joint Studio

A delegation from the Chinese Academy of Urban Planning and Design recently visited MIT’s Department of Urban Studies & Planning.  Issues such as the Beijing Studio and value of cooperation and open dialog in planning cities were discussed.  Since 1985 MIT and Tsingua University in Beijing have sponsored a joint urban design studio with students and faculty from both schools.  The studio has explored many options for neighborhood and commercial revitalization in the capital city.  Strong support for the studio and the expansion of exchanges between MIT and Urban Planning institutions in China was expressed.  The discussion also explored the need for conservation of the historical and cultural context of Chinese cities in the face of modernization and what steps could be taken to encourage alternative models of development.  The current approach relies extensively on urban renewal with much demolition and development prototypes imported from western cities, including high rise development and ground level plazas that have little to do with Chinese traditions of City Planning.  Members of the Academy discussed the need to explore alternatives that are more sensitive to the Chinese cultural patrimony, while also facilitating economic development.  How to reconcile these objectives is a challenge for all planners.

MIT/Technical University of Delft in the Netherlands

In January 2001 seven students from the Department of Urban Studies and Planning at MIT participated in a workshop on airport development at the Technical University of Delft in the Netherlands.  The MIT planning students, together with MIT students from two other departments and students from the faculties of Architecture, Public Policy, and Aerospace Engineering at Delft, examined the factors that are creating imperatives for expansion in the airline industry, the local conflicts this generates, and the way these are addressed in land use planning and development around Schipol Airport.  Schipol, like many airports around the world, is planning to expand and this development is contested.  The persistent controversy at Schipol is notable as one of the few instances in which the strong history of consensus building that have prevailed in Dutch planning and policy-making since the 1980s has not led to a program of action.

The two-week course was a pilot program for a broader project on the ecological city in the new economy that is being developed by TUD and MIT.  The first phase of this program focuses on airports as cities and inquires into how imperatives for sustainable development might be met in this kind of applied context.  The students' work began to open up the commitments and practices that define airport planning to a new kind of scrutiny and analysis.  One of the goals for the planning students is to ask how new forms of economic and political organization influence the terms and institutional contexts in which concerns about sustainability are raised and resolved.