This session will help you understand the opportunities and challenges of urbanization around the world. Global urbanization has the power to lift living standards, create economic opportunity and jobs, reduce pollution, improve energy efficiency, and make the world safer. But, many cities in the developing world remain poor, with millions of people crowded into global slums.

Cities have been the fonts of creativity since the dawn of civilization. The clustering of creative people in them and the diversity they bring is what drives key advances in arts, culture, and technology. These wellsprings of human progress have always occurred in our great cities from Athens and Rome to London, New York, and the emerging economies in Asia. This session will help you better understand how the clustering of diverse groups of creative people in cities spurs artistic achievement, scientific and technological advance, and human progress.

This session will help you better understand the New Urban Crisis and the growing economic divides that challenge cities today. In the second half of the 20th century, society was divided between poorer cities and richer suburbs. But, over the past decade or so, affluent and educated people have flocked back to urban centers pushing poverty out to the suburbs. Today, middle-class neighborhoods are in decline and our societies are defined by small areas of concentrated advantaged surrounded by much larger areas of concentrated disadvantage spanning the city and its suburb alike.

This session will help you better understand how the Covid-19 crisis will change cities and their recovery challenges. Covid-19 is not the first pandemic to strike our cities, nor will it be the last. Over the long course of history, cities have often been hotbeds of contagion and infectious disease. But no pandemic, plague, or natural disaster has ever managed to stifle their growth. When this pandemic is over in a couple of years, maybe less, New York and London will still be the world’s great financial centers; the San Francisco Bay Area its hub of high technology; and Los Angeles its center for entertainment and film. Shanghai, Tokyo, Hong Kong, Singapore, Paris, Toronto, and Sydney will all continue to be great global cities. But change will come to how and where we live and work. Our cities and society as a whole are likely to grow even more unequal than they are today, as both the disease and its economic fallout hit hardest at the least-advantaged. While some of these changes will prove to be evanescent, others may be permanent. Ultimately, the pandemic will be less of a break point or disruption, and more an accelerant to changes already afoot in our working and living patterns.

This session will help you understand the importance of where you live to your life and career. We each make three big decisions in our lives: our career, our choice of life-partner, and the place (city and neighborhood) where we live. We get lots of advice on the first two, but little on the third. Yet, choosing where to live is the most important decision of all. It shapes and influences the kinds of careers that we pursue and the kinds of people we will meet. This session provides you with the tools and a framework for choosing the place that is best for you and your family.