Metro Finance represents a new way of governing and financing cities. Increasingly, government, business, civic, philanthropic, university, and community networks, rather than the public sector alone, are collaborating to forge solutions that are holistic, integrated and multidisciplinary and raise, pool, and deploy capital from an array of local, national, and even global sources. The Nowak Lab will focus on three major sets of activities:

Reports you can use

Lab reports seek to catalyze impact, laying out new financial products and institutional models that can be put to use. Our reports are practitioner led and subject to practitioner review, so that practical concerns around the design, finance, delivery and governance of transformative investments are adequately addressed. Reports are intended to help corporate, civic and government leaders at both the macro and metro scale understand and leverage the potential of the new public/private/civic financing models emerging in the United States, Europe and beyond.

Read Nowak Lab Reports

City Cases

The Lab strives to be a continuous source of deep, objective research on proven financial instruments, codified within a new research product – City Cases – modeled after the case studies of the Central Indiana Corporate Partnership and the Copenhagen City & Port Development Corporation that appear in The New Localism. We work to capture and codify the best structural solutions and then explore ways in which these solutions could be adapted to cities with different legal systems, governance structures and economic starting points.

Read Nowak Lab City Cases

Workshops

The Lab selects important financing challenges for intensive review and problem solving, enabling the use of on-the-ground Finance Charettes to stimulate creative thinking on financing alternatives and spur real action.  In selecting the test cases, the Nowak Lab focuses on challenges and opportunities that are common to multiple cities and metros and conducive to creating new forms of financial instruments that can be routinized, intermediaries that can be scaled and institutions that can be replicated.

Sign up to receive updates about our work or contact lindyinstitute@drexel.edu if you'd like to discuss how we could work together.