DUSP MCP Application Essays
Please provide a statement explaining your reasons for wanting to do graduate work in Urban Studies and Planning at MIT. The statement should describe how you see, think, and feel about the world, as well as your professional objectives. You should set forth the issues or problems you want to address in the course of your studies and the environment in which you see yourself working professionally. As part of that endeavor, share your analysis or understanding of the challenges you are interested in working on. Be specific in articulating how graduate studies in DUSP would allow you to address those challenges and/or fulfill your professional objectives. Your honors, extracurricular activities, professional experiences, teaching, etc. need only be integrated into your statement to the extent that they relate to your proposed course of study at MIT and your professional aspirations.
I have become obsessed with the impact of our surroundings on our health and happiness. Around others, I have to hold back from being the person who points out the inefficiencies of our surface parking lots, the importance of public transit frequencies, and the vital comfort of street trees. This obsession grew out of a few different realizations over the course of my life. Over my 9 years at Hive, I have realized how much human interfaces matter. Whether the goal is to optimize a user onboarding, or to
Through software I realized my passion for designing interfaces. I was always sitting with the design team, working with them to flesh out what the information architecture of our product is and how to best translate that architecture into a user interface that is simple, parseable, and makes the user happy.
It was only while living in San Francisco that I started to understand that my love of cities was something that was deeply connected to my love of interfaces. Unlike many others, I was never unhappy to go to the “touristy” areas of a city and simply walk around to experience the sights and sounds, and see the types of experiences people, usually whole families, were having.
This goal encompasses concerns of environmental sustainability, economic sustainability, and equitable accessibility. Those concerns are table stakes, and must be included in any serious attempt to make our cities better. My thesis is that those concerns are not enough, by themselves, to radically improve our cities. We can, and should, retrofit our cities to make them more equitable and sustainable, but we should also aim to move our cities forward to a future where our built environment catalyztres our well-being and happiness.
My background is in software, and I do believe technology can help our cities significantly. However, I am not an advocate for integrating technology for technology’s sake, and we must be deliberate and thoughtful about ensuring technology serves the goals we have for our societies and our cities. Anyone working closely with AI, like I have been, must understand this.
Of all the institutions I’ve researched, MIT is the most interested in treating research areas not as standalone but as integrated systems across multiple disciplines. This is what attracted me to the System Design and Management program, and is what attracts me to doing learn and research more about city planning at MIT. The built environment of a city is not distinct from matters of policy, public health, transportation, economics, and technology. One can see this in the number of labs within the Department of Urban Studies and Planning, and the number of other research centers that also work with cities (Transportation, Media Lab, Morningside). It is this integrative approach that first gave me the excitement to begin working
In 2019, after having spent over 5 years helping Hive AI grow from a 6 person start-up to a 150 person company valued at $2B, I realized I wanted the next phase of my career to be focused on uniquely impactful work. To me this means work that I am uniquely well suited to perform and also has significant positive moral impact. In pursuit of this goal, I took stock of four life-long passions:
We should aim to build more joyful, playful, and immersive urban design. There is no reason why the places we live in and interact with every day cannot give us as much joy as the places we travel to on vacations. There are many systematic reasons why so many of our public spaces fall short of their potential, but I believe we need to shed the notion that it has to be this way.
This is not just about changing our cities to allow more imaginative urban design, but also about injecting the principles of walkability and placemaking into every step of how we plan and develop our cities. We must also build new generation of third places that bring together people from different walks of life. Libraries must be prioritized again, but we must also promote new “palaces for the people”.
I started developing MIX in an effort to explore this problem. MIX is an iOS app that uses geospatial augmented reality to create multi-user, shared experiences in public spaces. It’s just the start of my exploration into how we can use technology and spatial interfaces to innovate our urban design and placemaking.
I have been immensely inspired by Fábio Duarte’s book Urban Play, and gained a whole new appreciation for what is possible while auditing he and James Scott’s class on technology in the built environment this past semester. It would be a great opportunity to continue to learn from Professor Duarte and to help contribute to the work he and the others are doing at the Senseable City Lab.
How can we make our spatial networks more sustainable, accessible, and comfortable? or How can we make our transportation safer and less reliant on private vehicles?
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In Durham, North Carolina, 28 people are killed every year in motor vehicle collisions. Our most urgent moral need in cities is to solve the public health crisis that we have wrought with our transportation system. This means wrestling with the problems of car-dependency and an underinvestment in public transit. This also means acknowledging that traffic safety is not an isolated issue and is deeply connected to the issues of land use, housing affordability, poverty, and equity. The availability of free parking, the bollards protecting bike lanes, the curb radii used at intersections, and the distribution of affordable housing are all examples of infrastructure that directly impacts how the space in our cities is used, and in turn on the quality of life for the residents of our cities.
This problem is why I joined the Bicycle and Pedestrian Advisory Commission (BPAC) in Durham in 2021. Many of Durham’s roads are owned and maintained by the North Carolina Department of Transportation (NCDOT), and many of the improvements our residents want to see require vigilant advocacy both with City Council and with the NCDOT. Joining BPAC was my first attempt to help this cause in my hometown and learn about what problems stood in the way of seeing infrastructure improvements realized.
The large number of projects related to transportation both within DUSP and at other departments are one of the many reasons why MIT is a great place to explore this problem. The Digital Matatus project that Sarah Williams and the Civic Data Design Lab worked on sparked a thought for further investigation: what learnings from these more organic transportation systems can we adapt to our own public transit networks? Even within SDM, transportation systems are an area of deep research. The interdisciplinary environment at MIT would be a perfect place to dive deeper into new ways we can push forward the transportation networks in our cities.
How can we improve the ability of our public institutions to understand and engage with its communities?
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I believe technology, data, and AI can provide hugely valuable services to our cities. My experience with AI at Hive also gives me confidence that there are many untapped ways that AI and machine learning can be used to improve our understanding of cities. However, we must be deliberate and thoughtful about ensuring that any use of technology promotes equity and justice.
We must also find ways to improve the ways cities and local governments engage with their communities. On BPAC, I’ve seen first hand how difficult it is for residents to play an active role in the design and planning of their urban environments. We must work to restructure our existing systems to bring back trust between the many disenfranchised communities in our cities and their governments. Whether through technology or through other systemic improvements, the primary goal must be to make our cities more equitable and safe by bringing more people into the process.
My goal is to eventually start my own venture focused on solving one or multiple of these built environment related challenges. Having spent a semester at MIT already, I have seen how valuable the interdisciplinary environment would be to discovering impactful ways to improve our cities. Through my existing program I have already begun to explore the many resources available at MIT for new ventures, and I would hope to apply to the DesignX incubator if given the opportunity.
That being said, it is the balance between the theory and the practice that has made me most excited about being at MIT. I’ve especially seen this embodied at DUSP. The Roboat project at the Senseable City Lab was a quintessential example of this balance – innovation that started in the research lab that eventually led to the delivery of a real solution.
In Durham, North Carolina, 7 pedestrians are killed every year in collisions with motor vehicles. (more data?).
Seeing and feeling the difference between a car-free street and a car-infested one, the difference between a comfortable walk with visual variety and a long walk through empty parking lots, or the difference between a train ride and a drive through traffic have all become integral parts of my outlook on cities.
My fundamental professional goal is to do uniquely optimal work. For me, this is work that, for whatever reason, I am uniquely well suited to perform and also has significant positive moral impact.
Since 2018, I have been seeking to realize this goal through a variety of experiments, classes, conferences, and volunteer efforts. Over the last two years, it has become exceedingly clear to me that my passions, skills, and values are all aligned towards one fundamental goal: making our built environments more joyful.
Of all the institutions I’ve researched, MIT is the most interested in treating research areas not as standalone but as integrated systems across multiple disciplines. This is what attracted me to the System Design and Management program, and is what attracts me to doing learn and research more about city planning at MIT. The built environment of a city is not distinct from matters of policy, public health, transportation, economics, and technology. One can see this in the number of labs within the Department of Urban Studies and Planning, and the number of other research centers that also work with cities (Transportation, Media Lab, Morningside). It is this integrative approach that first gave me the excitement to begin working
If we are to successfully focus on well-being, we inevitably must focus on diversity, equity, and inclusivity. If our efforts to improve well-being are not distributed with equity in mind, and are not delivered in a manner that includes and considers all different types of races, genders, nationalities, mental circumstances, physical circumstances, and socio-economic circumstances, then those efforts will not truly be focused on well-being. This understanding of well-being is foundational in my values, and one that will surely evolve as I continue to learn more.
To me, equity and inclusivity are fundamentally about making sure well-being is not conditional or correlated with any race, gender, sexual orientation, ethnicity, nationality, socio-economic circumstances, physical or mental conditions, or genetic makeup. If we want to deliver well-being successfully, we must do so equitably and inclusively.
Being Turkish in North Carolina and having diverse interests (like playing basketball and playing cello) gave me a unique experience wrestling with identity. Looking “ambiguous” like I do also meant that in most cultural contexts I was considered neither a complete insider nor a complete outsider. I learned to navigate that feeling and be comfortable in all contexts, while not necessarily housing my identity in any one context. Growing up a “third culture kid” has informed how and why I try to make every room I’m in one that is sensitive to the subtleties of inclusion.
During the 2020 election, I led the efforts of 25 other volunteers helping to drive voter registration and turnout in Savannah, Georgia. Poorer communities tend to have lower turnout, and through our work it became apparent that helping these communities was not just about trying to convince them to vote. Rather, the important work was in humbly listening to why these often unhoused or significantly impoverished residents have lost faith in their political systems, and discussing what small steps can be taken towards more shared prosperity. This was an important lesson that true equity-focused work needs to go much deeper than it often does.
While on the Durham Bicycle and Pedestrian Advisory Commission (BPAC), I have focused much of our work on Vision Zero. Our poorest residents cannot afford to own cars, and are disproportionately killed as pedestrians and cyclists. I attended the Vision Zero Leadership Institute in an effort to work with local transportation engineers to accelerate the reduction of these tragedies in Durham.
Many of the actions we take on BPAC are informed by the historic harms communities have experienced throughout Durham. The historically black Hayti neighborhood was ravaged by the building of the Durham Freeway during the 1970s, and when a recent infrastructure improvement project in that neighborhood was canceled we wrote about our concerns of inequity to the City Council and ran a letter-writing campaign to the NC Department of Transportation.
When I graduated as a philosophy and computer science major, I promised myself that I would eventually transition my career to focus at least as much on what I love about philosophy (ethics and impact) as what I love about computer science (innovation and technology). Over recent years, I have been increasing my focus on impact-driven work, of which I believe equity and inclusivity are fundamental components. I aim to continue this increasing focus on impact as a discover the next phase of my career.