Back: The Team

Kaiwen Shi

Program Manager

As a Program Manager at Resilient Cities Catalyst, Kaiwen Shi works with government officials, non-profits, and communities to support resilience projects in multiple cities and regions.

Prior to joining RCC, Kaiwen was a MIT Global Displacement Fellow based in São Paulo, Brazil. He conducted research on displacement due to environmental disasters, focusing on how land and housing policies could improve the resilience and recovery of impacted communities. He helped develop a tool to track and verify climate displacements to complement existing efforts to collect and map data on displacement in general.

He has also worked as a researcher in Karachi, Pakistan, specifically in informal settlements threatened with demolition for infrastructure development projects. Using archival and ethnographic methods, he researched the patterns and discourses behind unequal spatial development in the city. He was also a freelance writer, contributing analyses on the intersections of urban and environmental inequity.

Kaiwen holds a Bachelor’s degree in Political Science from the University of Chicago and a Master in City Planning degree from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.