PROFESSOR
LAWRENCE SUSSKIND

Ford Professor of Urban
and Environmental Planning

Head of EPP

Environmental Policy and Planning  (EPP) invites you to consider undergraduate or graduate study at MIT. We offer an environmental “track” through the Undergraduate (SB), the Master in City Planning (MCP) degree and the Doctoral Program in Urban and Regional Planning (PhD). We also offer a Certificate in Environmental Planning for degree candidates in any of the DUSP degree programs along with a one-year MS in Environmental Policy for advanced practitioners. Students and faculty work together on projects that are worldwide in scope and interdisciplinary in nature. We try to maintain an informal atmosphere in which all points of view are taken seriously. Science, social science, engineering and humanistic perspectives are viewed as reinforcing each other, not as contradictory, while cross-cultural perspectives are woven into everything we do.

We work in three areas:

(1) Systems and Sustainability:  Engineered systems, social systems and ecological systems interact to create the possibilities for sustainable development.  We are interested in the kinds of social partnerships, at every scale (from local to global), that can play a role in encouraging technological innovation and managing natural resources in sustainable ways. We continue to imagine new approaches to regulation and new roles for government, new ways of harnessing market forces and engaging business interests, and new roles for civil society that will allow us to deal with science-intensive issues like climate change in a more timely and effective fashion.   While EPP is place-oriented, like the rest of DUSP, we are equally concerned about the maintenance of larger ecosystems and human-ecosystem interactions that transcend governmental boundaries and the short-term time horizons of most elected officials.

(2) Information and Assessment:  It is not easy to benchmark levels of sustainability or the scope and pace of environmental change.  We are trying to develop new tools and strategies for forecasting, modeling, monitoring, and assessing the environmental and social impacts of development of all kinds (at all scales). We are also interested in the politics of environmental analysis and the ways in which science and expert knowledge are used (and misused) in public
policy-making.

(3) Governance and Decision-making:  In the final analysis, “triple bottom line” considerations (i.e., economic impact, environmental impact, and social impact) lead to debates about trade-offs that must sometimes be made.  In a democratic society, such trade-offs ought to be the product of informed deliberation and collaborative decision-making (i.e. groups and individuals affected by such decisions ought to have some say about them).  How to structure collaborative decision- making and societal learning so that resources are wisely managed and justice or fairness is guaranteed, is very much the focus of our teaching, research and practice.

What characterizes our approach to Environmental Policy and Planning is a commitment to sustainable development, environmental justice and the need to balance science and politics in environmental policy-making.

If you have any additional questions, please contact us at epprequest@mit.edu;  the MIT Department of Urban Studies and Planning at http://dusp.mit.edu; the EPP homepage at  http:// web.mit.edu/dusp/epp/; or write to us at MIT.