Interactive Cities

Carlo Ratti, Faculty

A professor of the practice in MIT’s Department of Urban Studies and Planning, Ratti directs the Senseable City Lab, exploring how the increasing deployment of sensors and handheld electronics can radically transform the built environment. For example, one recent study from his lab suggested that using mobile-phone data to track people’s movements provides a method for measuring exposure to pollution in urban settings. Among his lab’s recent projects, in collaboration with biological engineering faculty Eric Alm, is Underworlds: a “smart sewage platform” for collecting and analyzing information about the bacteria, viruses, and chemical compounds that live in the human gut and converge in our communal wastewater.