Students Shaping the Future of Cities

The second annual Wharton Future of Cities Conference, organized by Wharton MBA students on the theme of “Urbanization Implications,” featured seven cross-disciplinary panels that wrestled with opportunities for rebuilding and restructuring urban systems in the wake of COVID-19. Former Governor of Maryland and Mayor of Baltimore Martin O’Malley gave the keynote address.

The student organizing committee, composed of first- and second-year MBA students with an interest in urban issues, conceived the conference to “create a space for dialogue and collaboration among the public, private, and nonprofit sectors,” said Lakshmi Davey, member of the 2021 organizing committee.

The May 15 event attracted nearly 300 attendees from 14 countries, including both graduate and undergraduate students from across the university, students from 13 other universities and colleges, and a wide variety of industry attendees, including architecture, education, energy, finance, government, philanthropy, real estate, technology, telecommunications, and transportation professionals.  

“Many of the challenges facing cities cut across disciplines and fields and sectors,” Davey said. “We intentionally included people from different fields on all of the panels to encourage engagement across disciplines.” She noted that several cross-cutting topics came up in multiple sessions—climate change and environmental justice, for example—which served to underscore the interconnectedness of urban issues.

In his keynote address, titled “Smarter Cities and a New Way of Governing,” Governor O’Malley emphasized the possibilities of the present era. “Never before have we been able to model, measure, and map the human dynamics which unfold across our natural and built environments, ” he said, adding that we can now do these things “in real-time, in ways that all can see.” Exploiting today’s ability to make data-driven decisions—and to do this in a collaborative way—is at the heart of what O’Malley called “a new way of governing.”

Penn IUR Co-Directors Eugenie Birch and Susan Wachter acted as faculty advisors for both the 2020 and 2021 conferences, providing support, connections, and advice to the student organizing committee. “Students organized this with great strength and imagination,” said Birch.

The inaugural Wharton Conference on Cities was held in May 2020. Originally intended to be in-person, the coronavirus pandemic forced the organizers to regroup and hold the event online. Focused on the impact of the coronavirus pandemic on cities, recordings from that conference are available online. Students have begun planning for the third annual event, to be held in late spring 2022, and hope to hold it in-person. Visit the conference website for recordings from the first two years and for information on the 2022 event when it becomes available. Students who wish to get involved should email whartonfuturecities@gmail.com.