city as school

3 week series from harvard review - 10 posts

from cities need to get smarter:
Budget cuts simply can't derail efforts to make our cities smarter.
Under the gun, many are proposing cuts that may produce short-term savings but could result in longer term costs.

ibm's smarter cities challenge - boulder is in it

city as school:
Gilberto Dimenstein is a senior Brazilian journalist 

why is capital afraid of cities:
While minuscule amounts of program money are trickling out to small-scaled community-development institutions, billions of dollars are sitting in endowment funds. Making the case for investments that produce social impact as well as market returns is not a discussion most executive directors want to have with their board — or their financial stewards on Wall Street.
Large corporations know more about opportunities in Chinese markets than they do about opportunities in US cities. Few CEOs realize that their companies' "supplier diversity programs" might be self-defense exercises for an urbanized future.
Institutions aren't stupid. They're not mean-spirited. They just tend to do what they know. It's easier to invest in a few big companies. It's easier to buy from a few big vendors. And it's easier to sell to a monolithic mass market than to the diverse and dynamic collection of markets that we call a city.