The MIT-UTM Malaysia Sustainable Cities Program

The MIT- UTM Malaysia Sustainable Cities Program (MSCP) is a five-year effort, initiated and run by faculty at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and the Universiti of Teknologi of Malaysia (UTM), with generous support by the Ministry of Education Malaysia. The MSCP mission is to study and document sustainable city development efforts in Malaysia. Research findings will be developed into online instructional materials to enhance and extend the teaching of sustainable city development across universities in the global South. The MSCP is housed in Science Impact Collaborative in the Department of Urban Studies and Planning at MIT and the Institut Sultan Iskandar (ISI) at UTM.

Every January, a student practicum will be held. Graduate students and faculty at MIT and UTM will partner with UTM to study, review, and refine the direction of the research in progress. The general theme of the five-year project shall be "Sustainable Cities in the Tropics", with various sub-themes delineated for the individual research by the visiting scholars. The project shall focus on five urban regions in Malaysia as case studies: Johor Bahru or Iskandar Malaysia, Kuala Lumpur, Putrajaya, Penang, Kuching, and Pahang (as a new expansion).

MSCP visiting scholars are selected each year by the MSCP university partners. They must commit to spending the Fall semester in Malaysia working on one of the questions on our Research Agenda. We match them up with university partners in Malaysia as well as with agencies, organizations and relevant community groups. They spend the spring semester at MIT working with faculty and advanced graduate students to generate research papers (for publication in our new e-journal or in other scholarly journals) and preparing teaching videos. We are building an interdisciplinary network of Visiting Scholars which now covers 22 countries.