The LOEB Fellowship

Matt Nohn alias Rapid Urbanism is an urban economist & development planner with 20+ years of work experience in 45+ countries focusing on land, infrastructure, & housing.

Matt serves as technical lead on large-scale development interventions and provides high-level strategic advice for climate-smart, human-centered, and fiscally responsible urbanization and local SDG implementation in cities with UN, World Bank, EU, GIZ/KFW, and civic and private organizations (e.g., Gates, C40, management consulting).
As CEO of the Initiative for Advanced Urbanization & Artificial Intelligence, he advances the Rapid Urbanism Explorer for rapid iterative prototyping of data-driven urbanization scenarios to augment collective decision-making intelligence.
As Loeb Fellow at Harvard, he develops the Rapid Urbanism Framework addressing the land, location, infrastructure, housing, livelihood, mobility, and environment conundrum.
As ‘Rapid Urbanism’, he performs as environmental, urban, & architectural designer.

Starting his career as a bricklayer in 1995, Matt holds postgraduate degrees in Advanced Environmental Design (Harvard), Public Policy & Macroeconomics (Harvard), International Affairs (German National Merit Foundation), and Architecture & Planning (TU Darmstadt).