Owiso Makuku, MArch ’99, MCP ’99, knows what it means to stand out. Opinionated, driven, and half Kenyan, half Jewish, Makuku has long navigated spaces where she’s pegged as different or unconventional—especially once she began working in executive roles traditionally filled by white men. But drawing on her MIT training, she has made a career of exploring how use of space in cities can create collective feelings of belonging.
After working in cities in Massachusetts, New York, and Michigan, Makuku, a native New Yorker, is now CEO of the development organization Main Street Landing in Burlington, Vermont—not far from her undergraduate alma mater, Middlebury College.
As she grew up, Makuku had been struck by the impact of housing disparities in her community. After two post-college years in the Peace Corps, she sought to engage more deeply with that issue at MIT, where she found a program that prompted her to consider houses not just as buildings but as places—and to think about how to turn groups of those places into communities. So she graduated with a master’s in city planning as well as one in architecture. At MIT, she says, she learned not to “just come up with a design and stick it in the site.” Instead, plans should be informed by the site and seek to improve it.
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