Malaysia Sustainable Cities Working Paper Series
Visiting scholars and MIT graduate students and faculty want to publicize their research findings about sustainable city development in Malaysia as quickly as possible. To that end, we have initiated a Working Paper series aimed at providing such an outlet. Papers in this series are co-copyrighted by the individual scholars and MIT. Some will be subsequently re-published in revised form in peer-reviewed journals. Requests to re-publish should be submitted to the Malaysia Sustainable Cities Program Manager at malaysiacities@mit.edu. The editor of the Working Paper Series is Mr. Jeffrey Cruikshank.
All the Working Papers are tagged by research theme, geographic location, and MSCP Visiting Scholar cohort year.
One of the goals of the MIT-Malaysia Sustainable Cities Program (MSCP) is to produce free video teaching materials that scholars anywhere can incorporate into their own college and agency-based instructional efforts. They are aimed at anyone teaching about aspects of sustainable city development in the developing world. Because Malaysia is committed to low carbon development and takes the Sustainable Development Goals seriously, its efforts should be of special interest to urban and environmental planners, engineers and social scientists wrestling with various urban and environmental issues. Videos are prepared by the MSCP Visiting Scholars who have spent several months doing field research in Malaysia, as well as by MIT graduate students and faculty. The videos are organized by research theme, geographic location and the cohort year of the scholars.
Each January, 12 – 15 MIT graduate students travel to Malaysia during MIT’s Independent Activities Period. They spend part of the preceding semester learning about the culture, politics, environment and history of Malaysia. Working with Malaysian graduate students they visit several of the five cities on which MSCP focuses. They meet with agency staff and community representatives, taking note of interesting and important sustainable city development efforts that the Visiting Scholars might spend the following year documenting. When they return to MIT, they produce an annual Research Agenda that new Visiting Scholars use as a basis for focusing their own field research in Malaysia the following year.