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 his STC employment with The World Bank, he consults for international development agencies (i.a., UN-Habitat, Cities Alliance, C40, GIZ/KFW), national governments (e.g., Rwanda Green Fund FONERWA, National Housing Bank India NHB). He also advises some of the world’s leading business consulting firms, as well as civic organizations (e.g., Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation BMGF, Institute for Transportation and Development Policy ITDP, Women in Informal Employment Globalizing and Organizing WIEGO, Environmental Planning Collaborative EPC), as well as advises .
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.
Matt has developed Rapid Urbanism, integrating physical and environmental design for a 4P multi-bottom line: people, planet, profit, polity. Moreover, Rapid Urbanism provides 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. Often, Rapid Urbanism shows how to connect private and public resources to self-managed organizations of the urban poor, such as using microfinance and subsidies in support of self-led urban and housing development. This way, Rapid Urbanism create truly scalable policy responses that are 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.
Under his pseudonym Rapid Urbanism, Matt also designs architectures, urban habitats, and cities, and . 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. As an author, he has also (co)produced many publications, including a manual for street design and academic journal articles, or the masterplan for Green City Kigali.
Starting his professional career as a bricklayer in 1996, Matt has served as a Loeb Fellow in Advanced Environmental Design at Harvard GSD since 2014, and as adjunct lecturer at multiple leading universities since 2004. 2012-2013, Matt acted as Visiting Professor for Urban Management at TU Darmstadt, Germany, leading the EU-funded Mundus Urbano Program. He holds a Master of Public Policy with concentration in Political and Economic Development from Harvard Kennedy School of Government, for which he had received the prestigious McCloy Scholarship and where he won the Outstanding Policy Analysis Award (best thesis award) for his study Market-based Affordable Housing in Urban India, which contributed to the successful formation of both a community-driven housing microfinance company and a community-owned infrastructure and housing development company in India. He also earned a Post-graduate Certificate in International Affairs from the German Stiftungskolleg, in cooperation with German National Merit Foundation and the German Foreign Office. Earlier, he was awarded a Dipl.-Ing. Architecture with concentration in Urban Planning (TU Darmstadt) with the dean’s acknowledgement of his outstanding performance, after a DAAD Scholarship for postgraduate studies at UFRJ and PUC in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil.
Please find Matt’s linkedin profile and a wide range of information here.
His CV can be downloaded here.