Semester:
- Professor: John Macomber
- Term: Spring
- School: Harvard Business School
- Course ID: 1487
The course develops skills in five modules that build on each other. The frameworks and points of view are set out to shape a comprehensive ability to engage in investing, policy development, entrepreneurship, and large company leadership in an increasingly urban world. I. Buildings in Cities: Industry Basics and Project Delivery Strategies. Cities are comprised of structures, systems, and people. The course starts with the first commercial component of cities: buildings and commercial real estate. This module also covers high level aspects of contracts, bidding, and project delivery. II. Systems in Cities: Infrastructure Finance, Public Private Partnerships, and Land Value Capture introduces a basic toolkit of large project finance, with particular attention to how to engage private actors in multiple sectors in the built environment. III. Resilient Cities: Climate Adaptation and Financing Resilience introduces and raises awareness of concepts and approaches including infectious diseases, climate change and sea level rise, wildfire, drought, and deep freezing to underscore choices and financing of the resilient infrastructure that moves energy, people, goods, waste and water through cities. IV. New Cities: Economic Development and Urban Policy looks at the interface between investing in hard infrastructure and the potential resulting benefits to both economic growth and to social and environmental sustainability. This module also touches on governance, urban planning, and design in several megaprojects and self-proclaimed new cities. IV. Smart Cities: Technology, Business Models, Opportunity, Obstacles draws on the first four modules to explore tools and approaches to address the many perils and challenges touched in the course, with particular emphasis on action to create business and investing opportunities, to impact policy, and to consider both elite and less elite groups of people facing urban, environmental, and climate challenges in the US and around the world. Cases are drawn 1/3 from the USA, 1/3 from Asia including both India and China, and 1/3 from the rest of the world, notably Latin America and Africa. There are historic cities and newer cities. Infrastructure sectors include roads, rail, power, water, municipal solid waste, commercial real estate, and more.