Overview

Learn from Kent Larson and Luis Alonso on how creative design can make transformative changes in communities

About the Speakers

Kent Larson is an architect, MIT Professor of the Practice, Director of the City Science group at the MIT Media Lab, and Co-Director of the Norman Foster Institute on Sustainable Cities. Larson received 10-Year Impact Awards from Ubicomp in 2017 and 2019 for recognition of work that, with the test of time, has had the greatest impact. He has given over 100 invited keynote talks and delivered a TED talk with 1.3 million views. He founded multiple MIT Media Lab spin-off companies, including ORI Living, and the consulting firm L3cities.

Luis Alonso is a Principal Research Scientist in the City Science group. He oversees the integration of the group's diverse research topics (energy consumption, city simulation, urban mobility, innovation district, and smart housing) in City Science Network, to provide comprehensive solutions for urban and country challenges, in order to transform cities into more diverse and vibrant human scale ecosystems. Luis has a PhD in Architecture from the Polytechnic University of Madrid.

About the Talk

The MIT City Science research journey began with prototyping advanced systems: shared-use mobility, transformable housing, and tangible decision tools. It evolved into simulation platforms to help communities understand the impact of proposals and guide consensus-building. Today, the group's work increasingly focuses on something even more fundamental: building dynamic governance systems with feedback loops and adaptive incentives to enable responsive, pro-social development.Through an international network of City Science Labs, interdisciplinary collaborations, open-source tools, exhibitions, and startups, the team aims to help scale urban innovation globally.

For this talk we welcome Director of MIT City Science and Professor of the Practice, Kent Larson, and Principal Research Scientist, Luis Alonso to share their thoughts and vision on the future of human flourishing. They will share how the key innovations of our era —AI-powered governance, behavioral simulation, generative design, robotics, and real-time data analytics—can be leveraged to build new models of urban transformation.