Dear colleagues,

I am excited to announce that the we will be offering our first full-week Executive Education class on Modeling Urban Sustainability - Energy, Daylight and Walkability on August 17-21 on the MIT campus in Cambridge, MA.

Cities across the planet are growing at an unprecedented speed. To accommodate the rising number of residents, city governments need to densify and expand while managing their carbon emissions. At the same time, cities have to ensure that the quality of their built environment is not sacrificed at the expense of density. The overall goal is thus to design sustainable, high density neighborhoods that combine building resource-efficiency with quality indoor and outdoor spaces, which in turn support community building and favor human powered modes of transportation. To help city governments and their consultants to develop such neighborhoods, the Sustainable Design Lab at MIT has developed a Rhino-based urban modeling platform called umi.

In this class the umi development team will present the science and models underlying umi in a manner that is accessible to an audience of urban planners, city governments, utilities, consultants and architects. Participants will acquire a range of urban analysis techniques and be exposed to results from several umi case studies world-wide. Specific simulation outputs that will be discussed are:

* Operational and embodied building energy use

* Neighborhood-wide daylight availability

* Walkability

* Annual outdoor thermal comfort

We hope to see some of you this summer! Best,

Christoph, Carlos, Cody, Tarek and Timur

Christoph Reinhart
Associate Professor
Department of Architecture
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
77 Massachusetts Ave, Rm 5-418, Cambridge, MA 02139, USA
t: 617 253 7714, f: 617 253 6152, creinhart at mit.edu
Sustainable Design Lab | DIVA | Daysim | mapdwell | umi
Training Modeling Urban Sustainability Aug 17-21