Video Player

The History of MIT’s Department of Urban Studies and Planning

Gary Hack PhD '76: April 4, 2008; Running Time: 0:51:12

About the Lecture

About the Lecture

Who better than Gary Hack to recount the colorful 75-year tale of the Department of Urban Studies and Planning? Associated with the department for more than half its life, and saturated with its lore, Hack reaches backward to describe the story’s “five acts,” and then forward to imagine the department’s future.

The department emerged in the midst of the Depression, with faculty engaged primarily in city planning. Graduates “went out with the equipment to plan the massive growth in this country that occurred after World War II,” says Hack, with the know-how for laying out roads and neighborhoods. Act 2, “the urban studies years,” came after the war, with the department swelling to accommodate returning GIs, and a growing interest in studying “the implications … of renewal and slum clearance.” The last half of the ‘50s proved fertile, with the launch of Harvard and MIT’s Joint Center for Urban Studies. Then came the 60s, and “forces at work that tore the department apart.”

The Vietnam War, city riots, and questions about the direction of urban growth, “raised enormous doubts about … what planning was up to.” MIT faculty and students became advocates for neighborhood groups. In Act 3, “the urban action era,” a new department head added such fields as criminal justice and environmental planning, and committed to diversity of both faculty and students.

By 1980, academic life had evolved into an “era of parallel solitudes,” clusters of people intensely involved with each other “with a minimum amount of glue.” This Act 4 saw the start of an international planning focus, as well as a turn toward giving students the skills to be directly involved in building and real estate.

The most recent period, Act 5, has witnessed DUSP leaders working “hard to lift out of the rich bouillabaisse constructed over all those years some themes with crosscutting energy, things that could bring people together,” such as projects in New Orleans.

Hack imagines that MIT’s DUSP, along with other U.S. planning departments, will need to function in an increasingly global and interconnected world. Confronted by climate change, and massive growth of cities, planners will need to transcend their traditional ways of thinking and working. Hack concludes with a thought experiment: If we built high-speed rail in the Northeast corridor, cutting travel time from Boston to New York to one hour, what kind of development should occur, and what are the likely impacts? “We’re ill equipped even to answer these questions, and we need to do better,” Hack says.

Lecture Details

Location: Broad Institute

“Over the next 30 years, 70% of the new population and 80% of new jobs will land in 10 mega-regions in the US. We must think about those as new entities. We are poorly equipped. Regional-spatial planning went out, and we must revive it. ”

Gary Hack

About the Speaker

Gary Hack PhD '76

Dean of the School of Design and Paley Professor of City & Regional Planning
University of Pennsylvania

Gary Hack teaches, practices, and studies large-scale physical planning and urban design. He is co-author of the third edition of Site Planning and Lessons from Local Experiences, as well as numerous articles and chapters on the spatial environment of cities.

Recently he was a member of the team that won the competition and prepared the design guidelines for redeveloping the World Trade Center Site. He also co-directed an international comparative study of urbanization patterns on four continents, published as Global City Regions: A Comparative Perspective.

Hack has prepared plans for more than 30 cities in the United States and abroad, including the redevelopment plan for the Prudential Center in Boston, the West Side Waterfront plan in New York City, and the new Metropolitan Plan for Bangkok, Thailand. He has also worked with smaller communities on urban design issues.

Earlier in his career, Hack directed several large neighborhood demonstration projects and the redevelopment of urban waterfronts in a number of Canadian cities. He has also served as an urban design consultant for projects in Japan, Taiwan, China and Saudi Arabia.

Hack has served on the executive committee of the Association of Collegiate Schools of Planning and the Planning Accreditation Board. He is a former chair of the Philadelphia City Planning Commission, and is active in civic affairs in Philadelphia.

Hack received his B.Arch. from the University of Manitoba, an M.Arch. and M.U.P. from the University of Illinois, and a Ph.D. from MIT.

Gary Hack PhD '76

Hack's Penn website

About the Host

About the Host

Department of Urban Studies and Planning

The Department of Urban Studies and Planning (DUSP) is a department within the School of Architecture and Planning at MIT. It is comprised of four specialization areas (also referred to as Program Groups): City Design and Development; Environmental Policy and Planning; Housing, Community and Economic Development; and the International Development Group. There are also three cross-cutting areas of study: Transportation Planning and Policy, Urban Information Systems (UIS), and Regional Planning.