The social cost of air pollution

I had the pleasure of being interviewed by Eric Brown from the MIT Industrial Liaison Program. We had a pleasant conversation about my current leadership role at MIT/CRE and our research at the Sustainable Urbanization Lab. I would like to share some of the key points from the interview.

During the interview, I explore three areas of study. First, air pollution and consumer cities. While many researchers have explored the risks of air pollution to physical health, we studied the impact of air pollution in a much less evident aspect: emotional health. Using a unique approach through social media, we collected information that can lead us to understand the emotional toll that air pollution has on people’s lives. This analysis is even of greater importance if we look at consumer cities, where people are attracted due to the existing urban amenities. However, they can feel disincentivized if there are health risks like air pollution.

Second, our lab focuses on understanding the social pattern changes in cities through their real estate market. For example, we have seen how many people moved from city centers to suburbs during the pandemic. However, we observed many young workers without children moving to the city centers before the pandemic. How was this social pattern affected by the pandemic? I imagine this migration will still happen, although it may have slowed down due to the pandemic.

Finally, one topic that motivates me is green real estate. This semester I will be teaching a course (you are all invited to join it), where we will go through the 3-P: Planet, People, and Profit. We know that we have only one planet, and we have to be responsible and take care of the environment, that we are people and that companies work for a profit. What can we do to align social and economic value with this situation? If we consume less energy and reduce carbon emissions, we improve the environment and social life (as explained earlier). But to do this, we need to find new ways to show real estate developers and investors that building green and healthy could be as profitable.

We know that these questions are not easy to answer. That is why we have a systematic framework to help us understand and analyze them. These urban challenges are multifaceted and need to be analyzed from all possible perspectives, such as economic mechanisms, technological advances, business models, financing strategies, and social externalities.

You can read the full interview here: https://ilp.mit.edu/siqi-zheng