Tai DaCosta, 2008
Tai DaCosta worked in New Orleans through an MIT course centering on cities at risk, Spring 2008.
Tai A. DaCosta '08 (Architecture) of Jamaica was one of 15 MIT students who participated in CityScope, an undergraduate course that focused on cities at risk. The class, offered by the School of Architecture and Planning, gave students the opportunity to develop computation, calculation, and analytic techniques for identifying major urban problems. According to DaCosta:
It’s not until you actually go to another city, talk to people, and hear what they actually went through, do you realize, ‘Oh, man, what I am proposing may look good on paper, but in real life, there is no way it could work.’ If you’re just in a classroom, you miss all the nuances, which are so important.