The MIT Senseable City Laboratory is a digital laboratory within

MIT The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) is a private land-grant research university in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Established in 1861, MIT has played a key role in the development of modern technology and science, and is one of the mo ...

's City Design and Development group, within the Department of Urban Studies and Planning, which works in collaboration with the

MIT Media Lab The MIT Media Lab is a research laboratory at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, growing out of MIT's Architecture Machine Group in the School of Architecture. Its research does not restrict to fixed academic disciplines, but draws from ...

. The lab aims to investigate and anticipate how

digital technologies Digital electronics is a field of electronics involving the study of digital signals and the engineering of devices that use or produce them. This is in contrast to analog electronics and analog signals. Digital electronic circuits are usually ...

are changing the way people live and their implications at the urban scale.

History and description

Director

Carlo Ratti Carlo Ratti (born 1971 in Turin, Italy) is an Italian architect, engineer, inventor, educator and activist. He is a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology where he directs the MIT Senseable City Lab, a research group that explo ...

founded the Senseable City Lab in 2004. Its

mission statement A mission statement is a short statement of why an organization exists, what its overall goal is, the goal of its operations: what kind of product or service it provides, its primary customers or market, and its geographical region of operation ...

says that it seeks to creatively intervene and investigate the interface between people, technologies and the city. The Lab's work draws on diverse fields such as

urban planning Urban planning, also known as town planning, city planning, regional planning, or rural planning, is a technical and political process that is focused on the development and design of land use and the built environment, including air, water, ...

architecture Architecture is the art and technique of designing and building, as distinguished from the skills associated with construction. It is both the process and the product of sketching, conceiving, planning, designing, and constructing building ...

, design, engineering,

computer science Computer science is the study of computation, automation, and information. Computer science spans theoretical disciplines (such as algorithms, theory of computation, information theory, and automation) to Applied science, practical discipli ...

natural science Natural science is one of the branches of science concerned with the description, understanding and prediction of natural phenomena, based on empirical evidence from observation and experimentation. Mechanisms such as peer review and repeatab ...

and economics to capture the multi-disciplinary nature of urban problems and deliver research and applications that empower citizens to make choices to make a better liveable urban experience. Among the Lab's partners are a group of corporations, including

AT&T AT&T Inc. is an American multinational telecommunications holding company headquartered at Whitacre Tower in Downtown Dallas, Texas. It is the world's largest telecommunications company by revenue and the third largest provider of mobile tel ...

General Electric General Electric Company (GE) is an American multinational conglomerate founded in 1892, and incorporated in New York state and headquartered in Boston. The company operated in sectors including healthcare, aviation, power, renewable energ ...

Audi Audi AG () is a German automotive manufacturer of luxury vehicles headquartered in Ingolstadt, Bavaria, Germany. As a subsidiary of its parent company, the Volkswagen Group, Audi produces vehicles in nine production facilities worldwide. Th ...

ENEL Enel S.p.A. is an Italian Multinational corporation, multinational manufacturer and distributor of electricity and gas. Enel, which originally stood for Ente nazionale per l'energia elettrica (National Electricity Board), was first established ...

SNCF The Société nationale des chemins de fer français (; abbreviated as SNCF ; French for "National society of French railroads") is France's national state-owned railway company. Founded in 1938, it operates the country's national rail traffi ...

as well as cities such as

Copenhagen Copenhagen ( or .; da, København ) is the capital and most populous city of Denmark, with a proper population of around 815.000 in the last quarter of 2022; and some 1.370,000 in the urban area; and the wider Copenhagen metropolitan ar ...

London London is the capital and largest city of England and the United Kingdom, with a population of just under 9 million. It stands on the River Thames in south-east England at the head of a estuary down to the North Sea, and has been a majo ...

Singapore Singapore (), officially the Republic of Singapore, is a sovereign island country and city-state in maritime Southeast Asia. It lies about one degree of latitude () north of the equator, off the southern tip of the Malay Peninsula, borde ...

Seattle Seattle ( ) is a seaport city on the West Coast of the United States. It is the seat of King County, Washington. With a 2020 population of 737,015, it is the largest city in both the state of Washington and the Pacific Northwest regio ...

, and

Florence Florence ( ; it, Firenze ) is a city in Central Italy and the capital city of the Tuscany region. It is the most populated city in Tuscany, with 383,083 inhabitants in 2016, and over 1,520,000 in its metropolitan area.Bilancio demografico an ...

. Projects have included "The Copenhagen Wheel", which debuted at the

2009 United Nations Climate Change Conference The 2009 United Nations Climate Change Conference, commonly known as the Copenhagen Summit, was held at the Bella Center in Copenhagen, Denmark, between 7 and 18 December. The conference included the 15th session of the Conference of the Partie ...

, "Trash_Track" shown at the

Architectural League of New York The Architectural League of New York is a non-profit organization "for creative and intellectual work in architecture, urbanism, and related disciplines". The league dates from 1881, when Cass Gilbert organized meetings at the Salmagundi Club for ...

and the

Seattle Public Library The Seattle Public Library (SPL) is the public library system serving the city of Seattle, Washington. Efforts to start a Seattle library had commenced as early as 1868, with the system eventually being established by the city in 1890. The syste ...

, "New York Talk Exchange" featured in the MoMA The

Museum of Modern Art The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) is an art museum located in Midtown Manhattan, New York City, on 53rd Street between Fifth and Sixth Avenues. It plays a major role in developing and collecting modern art, and is often identified as one of ...

, and ''

Real Time Rome Real Time Rome is the MIT Senseable City Lab’s contribution to the 2006 Venice Biennale, directed by professor Richard Burdett. The project aggregated data from cell phones (obtained using Telecom Italia Gruppo TIM, legally TIM S.p.A. (forme ...

'', included in the 2006

Venice Biennale of Architecture Venice Biennale of Architecture (in Italian Mostra di Architettura di Venezia) is an international exhibition of architecture from nations around the world, held in Venice, Italy, every other year. It was held on even years until 2018, but 202 ...

. In 2010 the lab opened a new research center in Singapore as part of a $35 million MIT-led initiative on the Future of Urban Mobility.

Approach

The Senseable City Lab begins its project and research work with a vision for an urban future, or "urban demo". This vision is tailored to a particular city's needs and can be motivated by the challenges a place may be confronting, or by opportunities for providing new experiences or services due to advances in digital technologies. Urban demos are designed to be showcased at large public events and exhibitions to stimulate debate between citizens, public administrators, and industry. Following an urban demo, the Lab typically engages in more traditional academic research - analyzing the data that has been collected and producing research papers.

Achievements

Since 2004, the Senseable City Lab has grown rapidly reaching 35 completed projects by 2009 with a turnover of 63 researchers from all over the world. Lab researchers have produce
166 scientific publications
in high-impact academic journals such as "Eigenplaces: analysing cities using the space-time structure of the mobile phone network". The Lab's design work has been exhibited in some of the world's leading venues including the

Venice Biennale The Venice Biennale (; it, La Biennale di Venezia) is an international cultural exhibition hosted annually in Venice, Italy by the Biennale Foundation. The biennale has been organised every year since 1895, which makes it the oldest of ...

, MoMA The Museum of Modern Art, the 2008 Zaragoza World Expo, the Architectural League of New York, Design Museum Barcelona, the

Canadian Centre for Architecture The Canadian Centre for Architecture (CCA; french: Centre Canadien d'Architecture) is a Architecture museum, museum of architecture and research centre in Montreal, Quebec, Canada. It is located at 1920, rue Baile (1920, Baile Street), between r ...

and the

MIT Museum The MIT Museum, founded in 1971, is located at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, Massachusetts. It hosts collections of holography, technology-related artworks, artificial intelligence, architecture, robotics, maritime histor ...

. The Lab's work have been recognized in TIME Magazine's Best Invention of the Year 2007, Esquire Magazine's Best and Brightest 2008, Blueprint Magazine's List of 25 Who Will Change the World of Design in 2010, and Thames and Hudson's 2009 List of Innovators Shaping Our Creative Future. In January 2009, Director

represented the Lab as a delegate to the

World Economic Forum The World Economic Forum (WEF) is an international non-governmental and lobbying organisation based in Cologny, canton of Geneva, Switzerland. It was founded on 24 January 1971 by German engineer and economist Klaus Schwab. The foundation, ...

in Davos. In 2011, he presented at

TED TED may refer to: Economics and finance * TED spread between U.S. Treasuries and Eurodollar Education * ''Türk Eğitim Derneği'', the Turkish Education Association ** TED Ankara College Foundation Schools, Turkey ** Transvaal Education Depa ...

in Longbeach.

Treepedia

Treepedia is a Senseable City Lab project whose goal is to raise awareness of

urban forest An urban forest is a forest, or a collection of trees, that grow within a city, town or a suburb. In a wider sense, it may include any kind of woody plant vegetation growing in and around human settlements. As opposed to a forest park, whose eco ...

s. It uses digital vision techniques based on

Google Street View Google Street View is a technology featured in Google Maps and Google Earth that provides interactive panoramas from positions along many streets in the world. It was launched in 2007 in several cities in the United States, and has since expa ...

images. Its focus is on street trees rather than those in parks. The

open-source Open source is source code that is made freely available for possible modification and redistribution. Products include permission to use the source code, design documents, or content of the product. The open-source model is a decentralized sof ...

library, stored on

GitHub GitHub, Inc. () is an Internet hosting service for software development and version control using Git. It provides the distributed version control of Git plus access control, bug tracking, software feature requests, task management, continuous ...

, includes all the

Python Python may refer to: Snakes * Pythonidae, a family of nonvenomous snakes found in Africa, Asia, and Australia ** ''Python'' (genus), a genus of Pythonidae found in Africa and Asia * Python (mythology), a mythical serpent Computing * Python (pro ...

programming code to allow anyone to use it to calculate tree cover (measured as Green View Index, or GVI) for their own city or region.

References

External links

MIT Senseable City Lab
{{DEFAULTSORT:Mit Senseable City Lab Massachusetts Institute of Technology Urban studies and planning schools