Eva Kassens-Noor
Associate Professor of Urban and Transport Planning for Extreme Events and Autonomous Futures | Michigan State University
East Lansing, MI, UNITED STATES
An expert in urban transformations due to autonomous futures, extreme events, sporting mega-events, disasters, pandemics and emergencies.
Media
Publications:
Documents:
Videos:
Audio/Podcasts:
Biography
I am an Associate Professor of Urban and Transport Planning in the School of Planning, Design, and Construction at Michigan State University. I hold a joint appointment with the Global Urban Studies Program and am an Adjunct Associate Professor position in the Department of Geography, Environment and Spatial Sciences.
I research extreme events, e.g. sporting mega-events, pandemics, hurricanes etc., to increase resilience against them and leverage planning to create livable cities. Most of my work to date analyzes how planners use the Olympic Games to transform cities. Most recently, I started working on the transformation of society towards autonomous futures. I analyze people's perceptions about autonomous vehicles and their potential to change the way we move.
Industry Expertise (3)
Floriculture and Horticulture
Writing and Editing
Education/Learning
Areas of Expertise (3)
Transportation (Moving Millions)
Extreme Events
Autonomous Futures
Education (1)
Massachusetts Institute of Technology: Ph.D.
Links (2)
News (5)
How to Host the Olympics and Actually Improve Your City’s Transit
Wired online
2016-08-07
Deadlines can be helpful for projects that tend to drag on (see: New York's Second Avenue Subway), but they bring risks. “You can’t go cheap and easy and fast,” says Eva Kassens-Noor, an urban planner with Michigan State University. For example, Rio probably should have expanded even further on its hardy, high-capacity rail system. Because it was low on money and short on time, it pivoted to bus rapid transit systems in some areas. Not bad, but not ideal. This is why that drop-dead torch ceremony date is a killer, Kassens-Noor says: It forces to cities to make on-deadline decisions they might later regret. [...]
What the 1918 ‘Spanish flu’ tells us about Ebola
Futurity online
2014-10-23
Chandra and Eva Kassens-Noor, assistant professor of urban and transport planning, studied weekly death rates in 213 districts from nine provinces in India, information contained in reports from the sanitary commissioner’s office. [...]
Lessons From the ‘Spanish Flu,’ Nearly 100 Years Later
MSU Today online
2014-10-22
Siddharth Chandra, director of MSU’s Asian Studies Center and professor in MSU’s James Madison College, and Eva Kassens-Noor, assistant professor of urban and transport planning with a joint appointment in the Global Urban Studies Program, studied the evolution of the 1918 influenza pandemic, aka the “Spanish flu.” In 1918, the virus killed 50 million people worldwide, 10 to 20 million of whom were in India. In the United States alone, the Spanish flu claimed 675,000 lives in nine months. [...]
Lessons from 'Spanish flu,' nearly 100 years later
Science Daily online
2014-10-22
Siddharth Chandra, director of MSU's Asian Studies Center and professor in MSU's James Madison College, and Eva Kassens-Noor, assistant professor of urban and transport planning with a joint appointment in the Global Urban Studies Program, studied the evolution of the 1918 influenza pandemic, aka the "Spanish flu." In 1918, the virus killed 50 million people worldwide, 10 to 20 million of whom were in India. In the United States alone, the Spanish flu claimed 675,000 lives in nine months. [...]
Why Sochi Is By Far The Most Expensive Olympics Ever
Business Insider online
2014-01-17
Why would a country even want to have an event like the Olympics if it's going to cost some $50 billion? Mark Wilson, a professor of urban and regional planning at Michigan State University, and Eva Kassens-Noor, an assistant professor of urban and transport planning at Michigan State University, have spent some time studying "mega events" such as the Olympics, the World Cup, and the World's Fair, and found they have a variety of effects both in the short term and the long term. [...]
Journal Articles (7)
Olympic Transport Legacies: Rio de Janeiro’s Bus Rapid Transit System
Journal of Planning Education and Research
Eva Kassens-Noor, Christopher Gaffney, Joe Messina, Eric Phillips
2018 Since the International Olympic Committee (IOC) selected Rio de Janeiro to host the 2016 Olympic Games, large-scale transportation infrastructures have been transforming the city. We examine the transportation planning process and consequences of implementation in the run-up to the 2016 Olympic Games by triangulating qualitative and quantitative methods. We argue that because of the low cost, speed of implementation, best-practice knowledge, existing political coalitions, ease of land acquisition, and flexibility in planning, BRTs emerged as the dominant Olympic transport solution. We find that the transport planning process has undermined the public interest and placed the burdens of implementation disproportionally on the urban poor.
How to Bid Better for the Olympics: A Participatory Mega-Event Planning Strategy for Local Legacies
Journal of the American Planning Association
Eva Kassens-Noor, John Lauermann
2017 Problem, research strategy, and findings: Several cities have canceled their Olympic bids in recent years because of local protests and referenda. Bidding cities now face a new political reality as they debate whether a bid is in the best interests of local stakeholders. We present a case study of Boston's (MA) ultimately unsuccessful bid to be the U.S. city selected to host the 2024 Olympic Games. Boston 2024, a nonprofit organization, prepared 2 sequential bids. We ask whether, how, and why Boston 2024 changed its planning approach from the 1st to the 2nd bid to respond to significant protests over its failure to meaningfully involve stakeholders, identify specific legacies, and provide accurate cost details. Our findings are limited by our focus on a single case, the small number of interviewees, and the constraints of ethnographic work. Boston 2024 shifted from an elite-driven process to a more inclusive one, from making generic claims about the impact of hosting the Games to describing local legacies, and from opaque budgets to transparent ones. Boston 2024 did not involve city planners in meaningful ways or engage fully with opponents. These changes were thus not sufficient to overcome substantial local distrust and opposition.
Olympic Technologies: Tokyo 2020 and Beyond: The Urban Technology Metropolis
Journal of Urban Technology
Eva Kassens-Noor, Tatsuya Fukushige
2017 The Olympic Games bring tremendous impacts to host cities, yet little attention has been paid to the variety and novelty in urban technologies that are introduced through the mega-event vehicle. This paper argues that urban transformation associated with the Olympic Games increasingly spans the technological sphere. As a path-breaker the Olympic bid of Tokyo foreshadows a technological revolution that will make the capital of Japan the most advanced urban technology metropolis in the world. This is significant, as this pioneer for the city of the future may yield many valuable insights given the rapid implementation and acceleration of technological innovation proceeding into 2020. Consequently, lessons on how this technology may impact our society can be derived.
Mechanisms of policy failure: Boston’s 2024 Olympic bid
Urban Studies
Eva Kassens-Noor, John Lauermann
2017 Planning for mega-events such as the Olympics is at a turning point. There has been a power shift in the relationship between cities and the International Olympic Committee towards the former. This shift is based on the emergence of anti-bid opposition movements; the increasing complexity of bidding; demands for locally relevant legacies; and a changing political economic relationship between citizens, city governments and sports federations. Our paper draws on a long-term study of Boston’s failed bid to host the 2024 Summer Olympics, based on an ethnography within the bidding corporation and interviews with pro- and anti-bid stakeholders. We lay out the reasons why the Boston bid failed, and conclude that bid failure involves factors that work against elitist powers and towards democratic beneficiaries.
From ephemeral planning to permanent urbanism: An urban planning theory of mega-events
Urban Planning
Eva Kassens-Noor
2017 Mega-events like the Olympic Games are powerful forces that shape cities. In the wake of mega-events, a variety of positive and negative legacies have remained in host cities. In order to bring some theoretical clarity to debates about legacy creation, I introduce the concepts of the mega-event utopia, dystopia and heterotopia. A mega-event utopia is ideal and imaginary urbanism embracing abstract concepts about economies, socio-political systems, spaces, and societies in the host during events. The mega-event utopia (in contrast to other utopian visions other stakeholders may hold) is dictated by the desires of the mega-event owners irrespective of the realities in the event host. In short, a mega-event utopia is the perfect event host from the owner’s perspective. Mega-event utopias are suggested as a theoretical model for the systematic transformation of their host cities. As large-scale events progress as ever more powerful transformers into this century, mega-event dystopias have emerged as negatives of these idealistic utopias. As hybrid post-event landscapes, mega-event heterotopias manifest the temporary mega-event utopia as legacy imprints into the long-term realities in hosting cities. Using the Olympic utopia as an example of a mega-event utopia, I theorize utopian visions around four urban traits: economy, image, infrastructure and society. Through the concept of the mega-event legacy utopia, I also provide some insight toward the operationalization of the four urban traits for a city’s economic development, local place marketing, urban development, and public participation.
Flip, move, tweet: a blended course design for different learning environments in urban planning, sustainability, and climate change university courses
IJSoTEL
Eva Kassens-Noor
2016 While much academic work has focused on how a singular teaching practice impacts student engagement and learning, synergies among innovative teaching practices have largely been ignored by the academic community. I seek to address this gap by proposing a new blended course design and examine the impact three innovative teaching practices (flipped class, movement, and twitter) combined had on ten undergraduate students taking an urban planning course focused on sustainability and climate resilience.
Twitter as a teaching practice to enhance active and informal learning in higher education: The case of sustainable tweets
Active Learning in Higher Education
Eva Kassens-Noor
2012 With the rise of Web 2.0, a multitude of new possibilities on how to use these online technologies for active learning has intrigued researchers. While most instructors have used Twitter for in-class discussions, this study explores the teaching practice of Twitter as an active, informal, outside-of-class learning tool. Through a comparative experiment in a small classroom setting, this study asks whether the use of Twitter aids students in learning of a particular subject matter.