Alan Berger is associate professor of urban design and landscape architecture at MIT where he teaches courses in the Department of Urban Studies and Planning.

He founded and directs P-REX, the Project for Reclamation Excellence, a multidisciplinary research effort at MIT focusing on the design and reuse of deindustrialized landscapes worldwide. By using low-angle aerial photography, maps and other graphic evidence, Berger visually reveals evidence and trends of landscape waste throughout the world — from public health hazards such as abandoned mine pits, mountains of slag and pools of cyanide to vacant land, landfills, military installations and places associated with high- and low-density urbanization. How these sites are cleansed, valued and considered for adaptive reuse at local and regional scales is Berger's main area of interest.

His work emphasizes the link between our consumption of natural resources and the waste and destruction of landscape to help us better understand how to proceed with redesigning our wasteful places for future productive uses and more sustainable outcomes.

Xavier de Souza Briggs is an author, commentator, educator, and scholar, as well as an experienced manager and policy adviser. He is Associate Professor of Sociology and Urban Planning at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).

Briggs spent January 2009 to August 2011 on public service leave from the MIT faculty, appointed by President Obama to serve as Associate Director of the Office of Management and Budget in the White House. There, he oversaw a wide array of policy, budget, and management issues for roughly half the cabinet agencies—Commerce, Treasury, Housing and Urban Development, Transportation, Justice and Homeland Security—as well as the Small Business Administration, GSA, financial regulators, and other agencies. His portfolio ran the gamut from economic competitiveness to criminal justice and border security, from neighborhood revitalization and poverty reduction to the financial markets, environmental sustainability, and more.

A former community planner, Briggs’ award-winning research and teaching are about economic opportunity, effective democracy and governance, and racial and ethnic diversity in cities and metropolitan regions. He is the editor of The Geography of Opportunity (Brookings, 2005), which won the highest book award in planning and Democracy as Problem-Solving: Civic Capacity in Communities across the Globe (MIT Press, 2008), which examines efforts in the U.S. and other democracies—Brazil, India and South Africa—to lead change on unsustainable urban growth, regional economic restructuring, and the healthy development of the next generation. His latest book, with co-authors Sue Popkin and John Goering, is Moving to Opportunity: The Story of an American Experiment to Fight Ghetto Poverty (Oxford University Press, 2010). Briggs is founder of The Community Problem-Solving Project @ MIT and Working Smarter in Community Development, two innovative online resources for self-directed learning.

A former faculty member in public policy at Harvard, he has designed and led major leadership development, strategy, and other training programs for change agents in the public, private, and nonprofit/nongovernmental sectors. A frequent speaker on innovation and urban and metropolitan policy, he has also consulted on urban strategy to leading national and international organizations, such as the Ford and Rockefeller Foundations, and he has been an expert witness in civil rights litigation. In the public sector, he ran the urban policy research and development unit at the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development in the late 1990s. He is a member of the Aspen Institute’s Roundtable on Community Change and other advisory groups, and his views have appeared in The New York Times, Salon.com, National Public Radio, and other major media. Briggs holds an engineering degree from Stanford, an MPA from Harvard, and a Ph.D. in sociology and education from Columbia University.

James Buckley has more than 25 years of leadership in housing and community development activities. Buckley founded and managed Citizens Housing Corporation in San Francisco, where he completed more than 2,000 units in several award-winning, mixed-use developments from 1998 to 2009. Projects included adaptive reuse of historic buildings, low-income housing with community-serving commercial space, supportive housing for homeless households, and first-time home-buyer units.

Buckley started his housing career in 1986 with Bridge Housing Corporation in San Francisco, where he developed more than 2,000 new rental and ownership homes and 100,000 square feet of neighborhood-serving retail space. Buckley has a BA from Yale University and holds a master's degree in city and regional planning and a PhD in architecture from UC Berkeley. He is a currently a member of the San Francisco Historic Preservation Commission, a board member of the Society for American City and Regional Planning History, and a Vice President of the Vernacular Architecture Forum.

Ezra Haber Glenn is a lecturer in urban studies and planning at MIT. Prior to holding this position, he served as director of community development for the City of Lawrence, Mass. Past positions include director of planning and development and director of commercial development for the City of Somerville, Mass., and land use planner at the consulting firm of McGregor & Associates in Boston. He serves on the board of directors of the Somerville Community Corporation.

He has written a number of articles on the practice of local planning and community development, and is the author of Shape Your Neighborhood, Plan Your City: Participatory Tools for Urban Planning (O'Reilly Media, 2010).

Lawrence Susskind, a member of the MIT faculty since 1970, is one of America's best known public dispute mediators and co-founder of the interuniversity Program on Negotiation (PON) at Harvard Law School. He is Ford Professor of Urban and Environmental Planning at MIT, where he co-directs the Graduate Program in Environmental Policy and Planning and the MIT-USGS Science Impact Collaborative, which trains "Science Impact Coordinators." He is also director of MIT's new Faculty Environmental Network for Sustainability.

At Harvard Law School he is vice chair for instruction at PON and co-director of the Negotiation Pedagogy Initiative. In 1993, Susskind founded the Consensus Building Institute, a nonprofit provider of mediation services in some of the most complicated disputes around the world. He is the author of 19 books, including Breaking Robert's Rules (Oxford, 2007), which has been published in seven languages, and Built to Win: Creating a World-Class Negotiating Organization (Harvard Business Publishing, 2009).

You can follow Susskind's comments on current conflicts in the public policy world viewing his blog at http://theconsensusbuildingapproach.blogspot.com.

P. Christopher Zegras teaches graduate-level courses in urban transportation planning, statistics and land use-transportation planning in the Department of Urban Studies at MIT, where he has also co-taught urban design and planning studios and Practica in Beijing, Santiago de Chile, and Mexico City.

He currently serves as the MIT lead for the MIT-Portugal Program Transportation Systems Focus Area. He is also a member of the Campus Energy Task Force of the MIT Energy Initiative.