Matt Nohn is an urban economist and development planner with 20+ years of work experience in 40+ countries. Matt’s work bridges smoothly between academic research and on-the-ground action: besides contracting with international clients – such as World Bank, UN, Cities Alliance, GIZ, Gates Foundation, Institute for Transportation and Development Policy, or Self-Employed Women’s Association – he serves as a Loeb Fellow at Harvard and as academic faculty at multiple universities.
Under his pseudonym Rapid Urbanism, Matt also designs architectures, urban habitats, and cities. Appreciating community-driven urbanization, such as informal settlements and participatory slum upgrading, Matt learns from these systems to design new architectures (e.g., housing), human settlements, and advanced environmental designs.
Beyond physical and environmental design, Matt focuses on policies that connect private and public resources to self-managed organizations of the urban poor. He then employs his findings to design curative and preventive policies that make use of truly inclusive interfaces between formal and non-formal systems: rather than forcing their formalization, bottom-up processes serve as multipliers for top-down interventions that produce an incrementally improving, sustainable and resilient habitat with vibrant social networks, access to financial services, land, shelter, basic infrastructure and life-affirming employment opportunities.
In this regard, Matt has developed Rapid Urbanism: a toolbox with environmental planning, social organization, economic development and regulatory instruments that synergistically complement each other. The objective of Rapid Urbanism is to promote politically viable, administratively manageable and financially affordable tools that, collectively, empower societies to tackle rapid urbanization challenges at speed and at scale. Only this way, Rapid Urbanism can create a response that is meaningful, given the unprecedented magnitude and velocity of urbanization, constrained capacities and shortage of public resources. Rapid Urbanism addresses policy makers, community activists, architects, urban designers and planners as well as other actors in rapidly urbanizing cities of the global south.
As an author, he has also produced many publications, including a manual for street design and academic journal articles.
Starting his professional career as a bricklayer in 1996, today Matt serves as a Loeb Fellow at Harvard Graduate School of Design. He further holds postgraduate degrees in Public Policy (Harvard Kennedy School of Government), International Affairs (Stiftungskolleg), and Architecture and Planning (TU Darmstadt). Since 2004, he has served as faculty in Germany and India. 2012-2013, Matt acted as Visiting Professor for Urban Management at TU Darmstadt, Germany, leading the EU-funded Mundus Urbano Program. As McCloy Fellow at Harvard Kennedy School of Government he won the 2008 Outstanding Policy Analysis Award for his study Market-based Affordable Housing in Urban India, which contributed to the successful formation of two social housing enterprises in India.
Please find Matt’s linkedin profile and a wide range of information here.
His CV can be downloaded here.