Lawrence Vale is Associate Dean of the MIT School of Architecture and Planning, Ford Professor of Urban Design and Planning, and director of MIT’s Resilient Cities Housing Initiative. He is the author or editor of eleven books examining urban design, affordable housing and city planning, including four prize-winning volumes on American public housing. He delivered a keynote talk at the Society's 2018 conference, "Design-Politics: How Buildings Mean," later adapted for publication in Vol. 5.1 of Architecture Philosophy (2020).