Miho Mazereeuw Feature

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Interactive transcript
[MUSIC PLAYING]
MIHO MAZEREEUW: Hi, my name is Miho Mazereeuw. I teach architecture and urbanism in the School of Architecture and Planning. And I'm the director of the Urban Risk Lab. My background is in landscape architecture and architecture.
The reason I got into this field was my parents lived in Kobe in 1995, when they had an earthquake. Luckily, they weren't there at the time of the earthquake. But I was able to follow the recovery and really understand how it-- we really need to plan for these kinds of events ahead of time.
I was teaching at a few different places before coming to MIT, and I really wanted to start a lab at MIT because of the interdisciplinary nature of MIT. Although the lab is based in architecture and planning, it's really easy to reach across and meet faculty from other disciplines. And so we're able to really think through who the ideal team members would be.
So I started the Urban Risk Lab here at MIT with just myself and one student, Aditya Barve, who actually is now a research scientist and still with the lab. And we've grown since then, quite significantly, and have projects all around the world in many different types of disciplines.
In the Urban Risk Lab, we really believe in action research. So we're definitely doing the research as academics, but we want to really try to contribute to the place and people. And so if there's a way to work with the people there to help them develop tools, or even sometimes prototypes, or even sometimes full-scale projects that are embedded in their community, then we try to contribute at the same time as we're doing our own research.
And we always come to things by working with the people in the place. And so that's why we feel like we need to return-- with learning from their knowledge, we need to return the favor. We really believe that if we are developing, especially technology here at MIT, it has to be what people want to use and fulfill their needs.
And so we try as much as possible to work very closely with community members and local governments and spending as much time as they have been with for us so that when we are ready to-- or they're ready to use the products, it's really something that they've been asking for and what they need, and it's not an additional burden on them, but something that helps them with their lives.
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Interactive transcript
[MUSIC PLAYING]
MIHO MAZEREEUW: Hi, my name is Miho Mazereeuw. I teach architecture and urbanism in the School of Architecture and Planning. And I'm the director of the Urban Risk Lab. My background is in landscape architecture and architecture.
The reason I got into this field was my parents lived in Kobe in 1995, when they had an earthquake. Luckily, they weren't there at the time of the earthquake. But I was able to follow the recovery and really understand how it-- we really need to plan for these kinds of events ahead of time.
I was teaching at a few different places before coming to MIT, and I really wanted to start a lab at MIT because of the interdisciplinary nature of MIT. Although the lab is based in architecture and planning, it's really easy to reach across and meet faculty from other disciplines. And so we're able to really think through who the ideal team members would be.
So I started the Urban Risk Lab here at MIT with just myself and one student, Aditya Barve, who actually is now a research scientist and still with the lab. And we've grown since then, quite significantly, and have projects all around the world in many different types of disciplines.
In the Urban Risk Lab, we really believe in action research. So we're definitely doing the research as academics, but we want to really try to contribute to the place and people. And so if there's a way to work with the people there to help them develop tools, or even sometimes prototypes, or even sometimes full-scale projects that are embedded in their community, then we try to contribute at the same time as we're doing our own research.
And we always come to things by working with the people in the place. And so that's why we feel like we need to return-- with learning from their knowledge, we need to return the favor. We really believe that if we are developing, especially technology here at MIT, it has to be what people want to use and fulfill their needs.
And so we try as much as possible to work very closely with community members and local governments and spending as much time as they have been with for us so that when we are ready to-- or they're ready to use the products, it's really something that they've been asking for and what they need, and it's not an additional burden on them, but something that helps them with their lives.
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Interactive transcript
[MUSIC PLAYING]
MIHO MAZEREEUW: MIT is perfect for this kind of interdisciplinary work because we are one Institute, even though we're in different schools. Even the building of MIT, the original building where it's all connected, is meant to be about interdisciplinary work so that you can have an office in one discipline and then bump into somebody in the hallway from another discipline and have a conversation.
An example of this kind of work is this Climate Grand Challenge project on extreme weather. We were chosen as one of the flagship projects for the MIT Grand Challenges. And our project has 19 PIs from across MIT, from earth and atmospheric sciences, from engineering, people who are working on downscaling, climate information, and then modeling floods, storm surges, and then also modeling the stormwater. Once you get to the city, how does the stormwater get pumped out? And then we're working with cities. And so we're communicating with cities to share potential hazards in the future and helping them plan for that.
One other piece of this project also is about preparing for energy use and how the energy systems will be affected by these extreme weather events. And so it's a really exciting project with so many faculty from all over MIT campus. And we meet every two weeks and learn about how everyone's work is progressing. And then we have many smaller group meetings so that we can actually work on the project together. And we are working in a few different cities now, communicating with their local governments and communities. And it's about a five-year project that we're one year into.
So many faculty at MIT are actually working on climate-related work. And I think this next large push within MIT would be figuring out how we're not all individually doing separate types of projects. MIT tends to be along the lines of let 1,000 flowers bloom. And so rather than everybody working on their own siloed work, the idea will be pulling us together so that we can work together and make a greater impact.
I think also, along those lines, helping to move a lot of the research that's done here and share it with communities and countries be important next steps for MIT also so that not only is there amazing climate research being done here, how is it then shared and used by people? And I think that that second part of it can really be done through partnerships with corporations and businesses that have a larger reach and find ways to scale the work that's done here beyond the walls of our institution.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
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Interactive transcript
[MUSIC PLAYING]
MIHO MAZEREEUW: MIT is perfect for this kind of interdisciplinary work because we are one Institute, even though we're in different schools. Even the building of MIT, the original building where it's all connected, is meant to be about interdisciplinary work so that you can have an office in one discipline and then bump into somebody in the hallway from another discipline and have a conversation.
An example of this kind of work is this Climate Grand Challenge project on extreme weather. We were chosen as one of the flagship projects for the MIT Grand Challenges. And our project has 19 PIs from across MIT, from earth and atmospheric sciences, from engineering, people who are working on downscaling, climate information, and then modeling floods, storm surges, and then also modeling the stormwater. Once you get to the city, how does the stormwater get pumped out? And then we're working with cities. And so we're communicating with cities to share potential hazards in the future and helping them plan for that.
One other piece of this project also is about preparing for energy use and how the energy systems will be affected by these extreme weather events. And so it's a really exciting project with so many faculty from all over MIT campus. And we meet every two weeks and learn about how everyone's work is progressing. And then we have many smaller group meetings so that we can actually work on the project together. And we are working in a few different cities now, communicating with their local governments and communities. And it's about a five-year project that we're one year into.
So many faculty at MIT are actually working on climate-related work. And I think this next large push within MIT would be figuring out how we're not all individually doing separate types of projects. MIT tends to be along the lines of let 1,000 flowers bloom. And so rather than everybody working on their own siloed work, the idea will be pulling us together so that we can work together and make a greater impact.
I think also, along those lines, helping to move a lot of the research that's done here and share it with communities and countries be important next steps for MIT also so that not only is there amazing climate research being done here, how is it then shared and used by people? And I think that that second part of it can really be done through partnerships with corporations and businesses that have a larger reach and find ways to scale the work that's done here beyond the walls of our institution.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
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Interactive transcript
MIHO MAZEREEUW: Yeah, we're working on a number of projects all around the world that really try to take care of the community and help them prepare. But also, part of the preparation is advocacy, especially in villages. And so we're working with a community development organization in Thailand called CODI, and they work with about 7,000 villages across Thailand. And we're developing a platform that helps them prepare for floods and other kinds of disasters, but also helps them share their assets.
And the idea with that is that we would have this coordination platform that helps them grow some of their small businesses and data collect and be able to communicate between villages, too, if they need different types of resources. And so this, again, is great for the everyday, where it's really more about their economic output and helping small businesses grow. But the idea is that if there is a disaster, then they're already used to communicating and coordinating on this platform. So they can use that to help each other within the village and amongst other villages.
I think this has been interesting also for a number of companies in the area because it protects the people that work with them and work for them in the areas where different industries are set up. Because we're here in academia, we really try to treat each place and learn about each place, and we do fieldwork in each place and get to know people in each place. And so we've struggled a little bit in scaling the things that we've developed because we don't want to just have one thing that gets spread everywhere, and then it doesn't work for some people.
And so, in each instance, we've gone to really understand what the issues are. And even though it might use a similar kind of base platform, we've adapted it so that it fits the location, which makes it very slow for us to scale projects. But we understand that we are sitting on things that many others can use. And so I think that growth and scaling process would be with partnerships. And so we're hoping that there will be further more partnerships where people who are grounded in different locations can work with us and then help us to scale so that lots of other places and people can use our projects that we're working on here.
So one example of partnering with a corporation or a company. Currently, we're working with IHI in Japan. They have a site that used to be a ship-building site, and it's still going to be industrial and logistics, but they want to contribute to their community. So they're also turning it into an evacuation space.
And we are working with them both on the technology side and the design side of that project so that it becomes a new logistics center, but then it also invites the community to evacuate there because their site is higher than the surrounding neighborhoods. And the surrounding neighborhoods, some of the simulations say that if it floods, it could remain flooded for about two months. And so the hope is that-- and it's difficult inviting people to a logistics site. It wouldn't be people's first thought to let's evacuate there. And so there's a lot of community engagement, and then fun design and technology pieces that are going into that project to make it really serve both uses.
So those kinds of projects and working, I think that's where the design aspect comes back in, that it's not treated as a disaster management project. But really, with design, we're able to reach out to people in different ways, pull people in different ways, and engage with lots of different people. And design is a way to negotiate different interests so that there can be multiple interests, multiple uses in different times of the day so that type of site can be for everybody.