Consulting & Teaching
"Jeb Brugmann is a strategist of great analytical power."
- Jaime Lerner, architect and urban planner; former mayor of Curitiba, Brazil and president of the International Union of Architects
Papers & Presentations on Urban Strategy
- Living On An Urban Planet: More than half the world's population lives in cities. Now what? (Forbes.com)
- What is Wrong With This Picture? Keynote Address, 2009 World Bank Urban Week
- Mumbai's Biggest Slum Deserves Its Own Award: Protection as a UN World Heritage Site
- Overview in Building Sustainable Communities: A Global Urban Perspective (Vojnovic, ed.)
Strategy Applied in the World of Cities
- The California Endowment: Building healthy communities
- WWF-UK: Conceiving the ecological “Citysystem”
- BP and Johannesburg: Cleaner, safer fuels for low-income townships
- Centre for Social Innovation, Toronto: Scaling a community of urban change agents
- East London, UK: A new “Water City” urbanism
The Challenge
The world is increasingly organized into cities. As a result, urban designs, technologies, infrastructures, and governance make a growing contribution to the structure of societies and economies. Materials and information flows, business models and their cost structures, and social and political relations are increasingly extra-local, but they still work within the infrastructures, building clusters, and communities of distinct urban geographies. As the urban world expands to include another billion people by 2025, and then nearly a billion more by 2035, the ways we build, connect, and manage cities will further (re)structure world commerce, politics, consumption, and ecology. “Globalization” is an abstract description of this very material, continuing re-engineering of the world. The tangible end-result of globalization is a world urban system, the global “City” that we are building today.
The Practice
Urban strategy is the practice of shaping development in city districts, cities, and networks of cities:
- To align the often competing strategies of organizations, groups, governments, and/or industries to achieve strategic purposes together;
- To build lasting, place-based advantage in cities or individual districts.
