Andrea Chegut on The Value of Design
On 22-September, Andrea Chegut kicked off the 2021 Fall Urbanism Lecture Series, co-hosted by the City Design & Development Program (CDD), SMArchS Urbanism Program, and Norman B. Leventhal Center for Advanced Urbanism at MIT. Andrea Chegut directs the Real Estate Innovation Lab (REIL) at MIT’s Center for Real Estate, a research and development lab for the built environment that measures the financial and economic performance of innovation in real estate, design, and planning. The long-term compounding value of design, including but not limited to, street level greenery, provision of light, accessible urban streetscapes and expansive views, is an estimated 100 trillion dollar industry, and the lab’s work posits that the investment in communities through design frameworks for health and well-being are core tools for economic development.
The relationship between financier and designer has traditionally been at odds, but MIT’s REIL is challenging this, asking: is there a value in design and how can one connect the global market place to design practice? More specifically, the lab’s research articulates how quality of life factors such as the green index, correlate with the real estate value of the city. Chegut’s research encourages the co-integration of design, architecture, and financial models by asking how financial performance can be implicitly tied to the value of design. REIL is using advances in big data, machine learning, and machine vision to build adaptable algorithms to understand the complexity of the urban framework in the context of real estate and financially sustainable urban development. Their work expands upon the margins of knowledge using data science to help unlock a more sustainable, equitable, and healthy built environment that maintains financial efficiency and profitability.
By Joris Komen, Norman B. (1938) and Muriel Leventhal Fellow, Norman B. Leventhal Center for Advanced Urbanism.
![Daylight, views and healthy buildings. Assessing the value of daylight in office spaces [Credit: Irmak Turan]](https://miro.medium.com/v2/resize:fit:1400/format:webp/1*HcDYXEAgyZ3VmFeqVBB33g.png)
