MIT Senseable City Lab

A decade in and we’re just getting started.
We’re proud to continue our collaboration with , building on years of joint research—including the iconic .tech project, now its own startup—as we head into the next five years of big ideas, big data, and urban innovation.

🔔 Join our research team shaping urban futures: Senseable is recruiting internationally! 🌏

Visit senseable.mit.edu for full list of open positions and to apply.

Questions? Contact [email protected]

The MIT Senseable City Lab is co-hosting a biodiversity mapping event at Carré Laval, the future site of a new urban park & innovation area 🌎. We’re looking for Canada-based volunteers to help crowdsource data on local plants & insects using the ObsIdentify app.

Please sign up here: forms.gle/HtgwZqLQbfnsC6sCA, or scan the QR below.

Friday, Sept 26 2025
Two sessions: 10:30–12:00 & 2:30–4:00 (join one or both!)
Bring your smartphone with ObsIdentify installed

Come explore, document, and shape the future of this green space with us!

There is a strong Senseable presence at the 19th International Conference on Computational Urban Planning and Urban Management in London! Here, a few former Senseables grabbed dinner post-conference. Great to see so many of our Labbies together!

Left to right: Maosu, Winston, Rohit, Tom, Cate, Arianna, Yuan, and Minwook, who is not SCL, but MIT LCAU!

🍃Re-Leaf🍃 transforms tree distribution data in Amsterdam, Dubai, Los Angeles, and Rome, into dynamic “green skyscrapers”: physical models that allow visitors to intuitively compare vegetation density across very different climates and urban forms.

We are excited to see this exhibition come to life in just about a week!

Blending physical and digital experiences, Data Clouds challenges audiences to rethink these communities—not as marginalized spaces, but as vital, evolving environments born from human resilience and ingenuity.

Congratulations to Carlo! Head to the link in our bio for the full article, which made front-page MIT news.

Maker Faire Rome -The European Edition came to an end. It was great to meet so much young talent enthusiastic about science and technology! We thank SCL consortium members Carabinieri, CREA - Ricerca, and FAE Technology for having us at their booths, and U.S. Embassy to Italy - Ambasciata Americana a Roma for supporting the initiative.

Umberto recently presented data-based tools that can help city leaders and policymakers make more livable, inclusive, and lively downtowns at session “Emerging Strategies for Downtown Revitalization”.

"A deadly virus, locked in a room of three people, can only infect those three. A great idea, trapped in a single municipal office, may never escape city borders. It’s not just the content; it’s the context."

You can read more on infectious ideas in Carlo's latest piece in Bloomberg CityLab.

How the Science of Infection Can Make Cities Stronger To meet local challenges from climate change to corruption, city governments should make their best ideas go viral.

SCL's City Scanner project featuring is on display at the . The exhibit, ‘Rebuilding Beirut: Using Data to Co-Design a New Future,’ is part of the sixth biennial architecture exhibition ‘Time Space Existence’ presented by the European Cultural Centre (ECC). The exhibit also features two other research projects from that all support the rebuilding efforts in Beirut following the disastrous explosion at Port of Beirut in August 2020.

The exhibit is open through November 26, 2023 in Venice at the Palazzo Bembo. You can buy tickets and plan your visit to the exhibit at: https://www.labiennale.org/en.

Photo credit to Matteo Losurdo