The Community Innovators Lab (CoLab) is a center for planning and development within the MIT Department of Urban Studies and Planning (DUSP).
CoLab supports the development and use of knowledge from excluded communities to deepen civic engagement, improve community practice, inform policy, mobilize community assets, and generate shared wealth.
Watch the full panel discussion to see the whole conversation. In the summer of 2009, MIT CoLab deployed student staff to organizations in North Carolina, Mississippi, Massachusetts, New Jersey, and Los Angeles, among others, to collaborate with communities interested ...
At the Beloved Community Center in Greensboro, NC, homeless neighbors and community members alike contribute to tending a large and growing garden. They share the food the grow with neighbors and the homeless hospitality house next door, and will begin selling produce ...
CoLab summer interns Zach Mills and Chris Drakeford made a movie about a new MIT Campus icon: The Clovertruck. Music Tracks: gifaproducer: Crazy Love, The Motorcycle Song oldDog: Shame
CoLab summer interns Zach Mills and Chris Drakeford made a movie about a new MIT Campus icon: The Clovertruck. Music Tracks: gifaproducer: Crazy Love, The Motorcycle Song oldDog: Shame
How do you get a biodiesel processor in your community or on your campus?
On May 11th, a group of community leaders from across the nation gathered in New York to discuss what they are doing locally to improve their communities with the stimulus money. MIT graduate student researchers Uyen Le and Sarah Nusser presented an extensive flow diagram and spreadsheet ...
Residents of Bed-Stuy, Brooklyn are being displaced as gentrification forces them out. In the face of a changing neighborhood, these Brooklyn voices describe their ideal community.
Residents in the Bed-Stuy neighborhood of Brooklyn discuss their frustrations with food choice and grocery shopping. Even as the neighborhood changes and new stores come in, sometimes the prodicts are so expensive that local people can't access them.
Two friends, one a lifetime Bed-Stuy Brooklyn resident, and the other a Harlem native, talk about their love of New York Brownstones.
Elmer Lloyd, a proud former coal miner, struggles to come to terms with his prize fishpond becoming a polluted acid pond at the hands of a coal company.
McKinley Sumner heard a sound his backyard one day, and realized something wasn't right. When he walked to the edge of his property line, he found tractors from the abutting coal mine digging into his land. Soon he saw his local creek, once clean and healthy, turn ...
Elizabeth is a 12-year-old girl from Tambo de Mora, Peru. in 2007, her town was destroyed by an earthquake. Hear her words, and see the pictures she has taken of her town in this short audio slideshow.
In the spring semester of 2008, a mixed class of grad and undergrad students, including architects, urban planners, and engineers, worked in Tambo de Mora, a town on Peru's southern coast that was ruined by a earthquake a year before our visit. This is the story of the class.
