Cities of Tomorrow: Reimagining Urban Life

The next generation of global competitiveness will be won — or lost — in the design, financing, and stewardship of the world’s cities. Georgetown alumni discuss what that means for infrastructure, investment strategies, and emerging technologies.

The most ambitious transformations in human history are happening right now in cities around the globe.

“It’s a pretty remarkable period when you think about the totality of all of the great cities of the world,” says Roger Weber (MSF’18), Urban Planning Leader and Founder, New Cities Atlas, which chronicles the creation of the world’s new cities since 1950. “In the span of about three professional generations, we’re building basically 10 times what [previous generations] did in terms of total volume of new urban development.”

That expansion isn’t happening only in rapidly growing regions such as Africa, which is projected to surpass Asia by 2070 as the most populous place globally. It’s happening in established urban environments, which have also seen population surges. For example, the metropolitan areas of cities like Greenville, South Carolina, and Knoxville, Tennessee, are as big as London was only two centuries ago, raising questions about how to maintain aging infrastructures and pay for new ones.

The challenge is not simply building more cities. It’s building systems that work.

Recognizing this shift, Georgetown McDonough’s Steers Center for Global Real Assets has broadened its focus from commercial real estate to global real assets, an integrated view that brings together the built environment, the infrastructure that supports it, and the energy systems that power it.

“We believe the integration of these three things is the future,” says Matthew Cypher, Atara Kaufman Professor of the Practice and director of the Steers Center. “It’s what you’re seeing right now in the data center world, where you have traditional real estate in terms of a structure, energy which is the limiting factor, and infrastructure in the way of the servers.”

To explore how these systems are reshaping cities — from how they’re designed to how they’re financed, powered, and reimagined — Georgetown Business convened a conversation led by Cypher with alumni working across the real asset landscape: Paula Bejarano (MBA’18), senior vice president of business development and sales at Benteler Mobility, who is helping deploy autonomous electric mobility systems designed for shared urban transportation; Katherine McElroy (B’04), managing director of infrastructure debt investments at the Paris-based firm Infranity; and Weber, who has across multiple companies overseen the planning and design of cities around the world.

Together, they offer insights into one of the defining questions of this century: How to rethink cities and sustain ecosystems at a scale the world has never attempted before.

Matthew Cypher: Roger, can you get us started with framing the growth of our global urban population from 1950 to 2050?

Roger Weber: We quite literally are right in the thick of what is the most remarkable century in the history of the world when it comes to the development of cities. In 1950, the population of all the world’s cities was about 700 million. By the year 2050, the population of the world’s cities is going to be somewhere in the order of about 7 billion. 

We’re talking about economies of scale that we’ve never seen before. Cities within recent memory that had only a few million people are projected to be in the order of 100 million people by the end of the century, which is three times as large as Tokyo. And so, the question that we’re all trying to answer, from our different professional perspectives is: How do you even create that ecosystem? 

On the one hand, it’s tremendously capital-intensive, but also completely unprecedented and extremely speculative in the midst of tremendous technological change. There’s a lot to tackle. 

MC: Thank you for framing us like that. Katie, how do you think about what Roger said relative to your business when you think about the money that’s already been invested, the growth that will occur, and the capital that will be required?

Katherine McElroy: Roger’s numbers are quite fascinating and his comment that “there is a lot to tackle” is consistent with what we observe in North America and Europe in terms of the need for additional infrastructure investment. He framed it with the lens of growth, but the need to replace or update aging infrastructure compounds what is required. All estimates of what all of this will cost are staggering. I have yet to see a report yet that convincingly bridges the funding gap, which drives much of the conversation toward defining the right model or models.

MC: Where has the capital for infrastructure come from thus far? 

KM: Historically, infrastructure was primarily financed through government-backed or sovereign bond issuances. Leading up to the early 2000s, governments remained primary funders of large infrastructure through tax revenues, state-owned utilities, and public debt. Private capital was present but limited, with infrastructure regarded as a public good and not yet a distinct institutional asset class.

While funding models still differ by asset type and region, the picture has changed in the last 25 years due to a tremendous amount of private capital flowing into infrastructure. This comes from institutional investors like pension funds, insurance companies, and sovereign wealth funds. From a geographic perspective, Canadian and Australian investors were early and influential adopters of infrastructure, with large public pensions allocating meaningfully to the asset class. This interest has since spread globally. The Steers Center’s shift from real estate to real assets reflects the scale of the opportunity. The investment universe is large, and capital is increasingly flowing in to fill clear market gaps.

MC: In the United States, that would include water and wastewater, highways, and airports?

KM: Yes, in the United States many of those assets rely on bonds and municipal funding, which are efficient sources of capital but have limits. There is scope to accelerate capital flows by thinking a little more broadly and learning from models around the globe that have embraced the flow of private capital, for both asset ownership and asset management.

MC: Roger, where do you see capital coming from? 

RW: It’s a really big question, particularly with changing technologies. 

If you think back 10 or 15 years, and you were to ask to project the impacts on our infrastructure of things like autonomous vehicles, EVs, ride sharing, or even things like short-term rentals and Amazon, you probably would have been pretty inaccurate. You have to acknowledge that the certainty around predicting the specifics of new technologies and their impacts is really, really hard more than about three to five years out. 

The good news is that a lot of the underlying infrastructures that we build cities around can be very consistent. That’s something where you really can build for 50 to 75 years out, and those are the kinds of things where the public sector continues to be at the forefront. For more speculative and innovative pilot studies, there has been a shift toward the private sector. Certainly, the notion of privately developed cities — or at least private mechanisms established by governments to develop speculative cities — has been very interesting internationally. You start almost thinking about the city like a corporation, and that’s applied to transportation as well. 

MC: Paula, how does your firm think about autonomous transportation in an environment that is speculative and changes frequently? How do you build a business around that level of uncertainty?

Paula Bejarano: I definitely thrive in ambiguity. That’s just the nature of our business in terms of technology development, regulation, and public opinion. This is to be expected when introducing innovation in traditional sectors that are heavily regulated, such as transportation. 

Today, we work with transit agencies, urban planners, and infrastructure partners to help cities transition to the next generation of public transportation. This is how we collaborate, for instance, with the Jacksonville Transportation Authority in Florida. It’s not about knowing what the city is going to look like 50 years from now — there are problems now: congestion, emissions, land use. It’s rather focusing on identifying the technology, in this case shared mobility, that will help mitigate such issues. For the first couple years, our focus would be to deploy an autonomous pilot within a geofenced, controlled area. If that is successful, then you would start scaling upward. That’s also how we de-risk the fleet operation with regards to capital investment, technology maturation, and infrastructure buildout.

MC: What are cities like Jacksonville asking of you?

PB: Our transportation stakeholders in Jacksonville are asking us to deliver autonomous vehicle technology that is safe, reliable, and resilient. It is also important for them that we cooperate closely with regulatory bodies in Washington, DC, to ensure compliance and alignment. In partnership with JTA, one of our main customers, this effort goes beyond simply providing the technology — it requires planning with regards to workforce training and development, service operations as well as community engagement. Fleet operators are also looking for flexibility and openness in testing a variety of use cases and deployment models, emphasizing accessibility and inclusiveness for different rider groups.

MC: What are the big brains in your company thinking our world looks like from an autonomous perspective?

PB: We are already planning, as of late 2028, to build a plant in Florida where we will produce 5,000 to 10,000 vehicles per year. Mostly catering to the U.S. market, the manufacturing facility will feed our global pipeline in Europe and the Middle East too. The main customer vertical will be transit authorities, as they will take a lot of share of the volume. Our objective is not to replace the traditional 40-foot buses that operate fixed routes today. Rather, since our vehicles are smaller, the intent is to complement the existing service with a first- and last-mile network option, where there’s an actual service gap today. Buses either go underutilized, do not reach remote living areas, or there is just not enough workforce to meet the demands of the community. 

MC: Roger, in areas that are seeing explosive growth, how are they thinking about transportation infrastructure relative to moving people? How does the autonomous question play into their planning?

RW: Paula’s point is a really good one. The reality is when you see countries that are growing rapidly, the approach is to build infrastructure that actually serves the interests of people. You can think about that as matching the relationship between the costs and the revenues. 

AVs are a really interesting situation because they could have tremendous impacts on the foundational capital that our country is built on but also continue to be speculative. They’ve come online in different and slower ways than people anticipated, but there are a lot of ways that it affects the physical infrastructure. A team I worked with in a previous consulting position explored this in New York City on 42nd. It’s crazy how many subtle things that you don’t think of potentially that need to change. You’re talking about different land-use densities, which affects the amount of curb and carriageway space within the street itself. You’re talking about different amounts of parking, the need for space for idling, streets that need to work with visualization technology, so that the cars can read it on the road but also so the micro autonomous technologies are able to read it on the sidewalks. Autonomous is really changing the way freight deliveries happen, in addition to the way people travel around. All these things need to get integrated into the design of physical infrastructure. 

When you’re doing it in a speculative new development internationally, you can be quite creative about it, but some of the biggest challenges come in the existing environments where we’ve already poured the money into building an interstate highway system, a city grid, and all those kinds of things. You need to figure out what the solution wants to be, which is a hard and speculative exercise in itself. And then how do you finance it when you don’t have growth as the primary engine?

MC: Those are important questions and problems. Katie, how does the word technology hit the ears of an infrastructure investor?

KM: I like the way Roger framed it. 

Infrastructure investors are often drawn to the asset class for downside protection. Assets with binary technology risk run counter to that objective and therefore sit outside most institutional infrastructure portfolios, with capital instead coming from venture investors. Once a technology is considered proven, the focus shifts to whether the revenue model is sufficiently bankable.

MC: Are you active investors in data centers in any dimension?

KM: Data centers provide a tremendous investment opportunity set right now. They sit at the intersection of real estate and infrastructure, but as power becomes the defining constraint, the opportunity increasingly favors infrastructure investors.

MC: Each of you think about resilience in a slightly different way. How do you each define what resilience means to the future of our cities relative to your business?

PB: When you think about an autonomous vehicle, we go beyond durability and think about technical resilience and the industrialization of automotive assets. For years, the public considered autonomous vehicles to be only an experimental project of Silicon Valley. However, times have changed and that’s no longer the case. My company, Benteler, has been around over 100 years. We do automotive parts for all the major OEMs. If you have a vehicle, it most likely has a Benteler part in it. Since rolling out a Holon autonomous solution, we have been committed to engineering a vehicle that is safe and compliant with automotive and ADA regulations. Additionally, we’re well aware that we needed to provide the community with an electric, shared, autonomous fleet that is emissions-free and can adapt to the multiple operational design domains in order to efficiently move around urban or suburban environments. 

KM: A lot of the resilience themes Paula brought up are applicable from an investor perspective. Infrastructure resilience is not just about being defensive, but a strategic capability that supports durable, long-term value across a diversified portfolio.

RW: I love Katie’s messaging about that long-term value. That fundamentally is what the infrastructure of a city needs to be. We’re creating the future of the world right now. We have to think about long-term threats and not view them as just fleeting things off in the future. If we know there’s something coming down the pike in 50 or 75 years, we have to build infrastructure now that addresses it. 

Change is inevitable in cities. You can’t think of them as static objects; and, therefore, we can’t think of the infrastructure nor the funding mechanisms as static objects. They need to be adaptable.

This Q&A was edited for length and clarity from a Zoom conversation held Feb. 27, 2026, for members of the Steers Center community. Watch the full conversation here.

This story was originally featured in the Georgetown Business Spring/Summer 2026 Magazine.