Events Executive Education Workshop 2011

Executive Education Workshop: Innovations in Sustainable Urban Mobility - June 2011

MIT Executive Education - Workshop details

June 27-30, 2011

Instructors: Kent Larson and Ryan Chin

This workshop-style course will focus on the development and deployment of innovations for achieving sustainable urban mobility in cities. We will examine the latest “in-the-box” innovations in technology, designs, strategies, and policies employed by cities to increase energy efficiency, reduce carbon emissions, and improve overall access and mobility for increasingly dense and crowded urban environments. We will also explore “out-of-the-box” innovations that go beyond incremental improvements and utilize system-level integration, holistic thinking, ecosystem solutions, and cutting edge technology.

Executive Education Course Website

 

The course will introduce a broad survey of the following key areas of sustainable urban mobility:

  1. Vehicles – A morphology of vehicle types (buses, cars, trucks, motorcycles, bicycles, segways) and technologies (electric, hybrids, fuel cells, biofuels, compressed natural gas, etc.) will be presented as well as the latest vehicle innovations (MIT Media Lab’s CityCar concept, GM’s EN-V, Autonomous Driving).
  2. Urban infrastructure – Electric charging infrastructure, rapid charging stations, Vehicle-to-Grid (V2G), Smart Grids, mass transit systems (i.e. Bus Rapid Transit), alternative vehicle lanes, and bike lanes.
  3. Use and Economic Models – Private car ownership, shared-use systems (i.e. ZipCar, bike sharing programs), fleet operations, public transit, on-demand systems, and traditional rentals.
  4. Urban Implementation – Urban design of streetscape, parking, buildings, creation of new urban policy (i.e. congestion pricing, dynamic road pricing), use of intelligent fleet management systems, integration into public transit systems, pilot testing, and deployment.

The course will be divided into three learning methods 1) lectures by course faculty and guests from academia and industry, 2) participatory group design work in “charrette” sessions (a type of brainstorming), and 3) critique by faculty and invited experts. Using the MIT campus as a potential site for deployment, course participants will work on a series of short in-class assignments that focus on solving practical mobility problems. The goal of the workshop is for participants to engage in critical thinking about the technological, social, cultural, and economic challenges for achieving smart sustainable cities in order to return to their community, corporation, or institution to implement positive change.

The course textbook will be Reinventing the Automobile: Personal Urban Mobility for the 21st Century, MIT Press, written by (the late) MIT Professor William J. Mitchell with two automotive experts from General Motors, Christopher Borroni-Bird and Lawrence Burns.