City Population Evolution
from 2025 to 2100
2025
Make New York's FiDi the World Capital for Urban Solutions.
Cities are growing faster than they can build housing, power, water and transport. and are rewriting what cities buy, and how fast.
Rising Temperatures
Breaking 1.5°C
Climate damage is mounting and policy is falling behind. ended without a roadmap off fossil fuels, is in reverse, and current policies point well past 1.5°C. Floods, heat and water shortages already cost lives and money. Swiss Re estimates unchecked warming could leave global GDP lower by 2050.
AI can cut energy bills, speed permits, prevent infrastructure failures and lift productivity. It also multiplies risk: costly deployments, exposed jobs and failures that cascade across city systems. Some researchers warn of an .
Cities need capability and control, now.
That urgency is a market: a potential a year in urban solutions by 2050, by our AI-assisted industry projections. Invent.City captures it for New York. Vacant Financial District become a permanent marketplace where agencies, utilities, owners and developers see, test and buy, and suppliers reach buyers worldwide.
Beyond speeding solutions to market, the base planning scenario models 13,173 jobs, $2.4B a year in direct economic activity, $219M a year in taxes and fees, and $71M in gross recurring NYC real-estate revenue capacity.
Four steps get there. Events test demand. The Trade Mart makes it permanent. A cluster grows around it. FiDi becomes a model city.
Bring a city challenge, a product, a property or capital. and build New York’s next economic engine with us.
Four steps, each building the market for the next. Events and media test demand cheaply. The Trade Mart makes it permanent on FiDi's vacant floors. A cluster grows around the Mart. FiDi becomes a model city.
Invent.City’s 2023–2024 market test focused on micro cargo and urban hubs. A new roundtable series, planned for early 2027, builds on that work and follows the structure of the Trade Mart.
Cities are complex buyers. Invent.City tests demand with events before committing major capital.
The events do three jobs: gather research from New York's civic community, build support for the project and test early revenue.
Each event follows the three themes that organize the Trade Mart: the cities that buy, the forces that drive demand and the industries that supply. Topics include future cities, AI in cities, the climate crisis and rising energy demand.
Cities are the buyers, and the fastest-growing ones are in Africa and South Asia. Lagos has about 17.2 million people today and is projected to reach nearly 90 million by 2100.
They need working systems faster than conventional procurement delivers. Mobility is urgent: bikeshare and light freight move people and goods without widening roads.
The same tools can improve short trips in New York. Invent.City's bikeshare and micro cargo roundtables produced one: the urban hub. Growing cities are also , driving demand for housing, transport and public services.
Forces decide what cities buy next, and climate and AI lead. Energy demand, demographics, technology, economics, geopolitics and social change follow, along with the rise of African and Asian cities and the pressures driving migration.
Invent.City's events focus on climate and AI and track the rest, pointing suppliers and capital to the most urgent purchases. shows how fast these industries scale: it produced 70% of the world’s electric cars and more than 80% of its battery cells in 2025, according to the IEA.
CLIMATE
CRISIS
ATMOSPHERIC CO₂
CO₂ sets new records
1958–2026 mean
SEA LEVEL • GLOBAL MEAN
Seas rise faster
Projected 2020–2100
WARMING PATHWAYS
Warming is still a choice
Two warming paths
ENERGY +
RESOURCES
LEVELIZED ENERGY COST
Renewables win on cost
Costs to 2050
ELECTRIC VEHICLES
EV adoption is uneven
New sales to 2035
CITY HEAT
Local warming
Illustrative; source pending
TECHNOLOGY +
INFRASTRUCTURE
AI • ADVANCED CITIES
AI optimizes city systems
Across city systems
AI • DEVELOPING CITIES
AI stretches scarce capacity
City services
AI • NEW YORK CITY
NYC’s AI upside
Annual value
PEOPLE +
SOCIETY
POPULATION • URBAN SHARE
Growth lands in cities
Urban growth share
GLOBAL CITIES
Africa reshapes the century
Top cities in 2100
GLOBAL MIGRATION
Displacement keeps rising
Climate and conflict
ECONOMY +
GEOPOLITICS
ENERGY • ELECTRICITY
Electricity Demand
Global demand to 2100
TECHNOLOGY ADOPTION
Crossing the chasm
Toward mainstream
WAR AND DISASTER
Damaged cities
Urban damage zones
A Trade Mart is a proven business model: a permanent marketplace of showrooms, demonstrations and industry events. Buyers compare offerings, meet the people behind them and build relationships in one place. Chicago's The Mart, Atlanta's AmericasMart and Dallas Market Center have run this model for decades.
Invent.City applies it to urban solutions. City agencies, building owners, developers and utilities, everyone responsible for how cities work, get one place to discover, evaluate and buy.
RAI
Amsterdam / Brussels
Chelsea Harbour
London
The Mart
Chicago
Dallas Market Center
Dallas / Austin
PDC
Los Angeles
World Trade Centre
Dubai
Hannover Messe
Hanover
AmericasMart
Atlanta
FiDi has the space, the transit, the address and a seat next to government and finance. Nearly 27% of office space in the project area is vacant. The area lies east of Broadway and south of the Brooklyn Bridge on-ramp, matching Cushman & Wakefield’s Insurance and Financial East submarkets. Those floors become showrooms and demonstration space.
Subways, ferries and bikeshare connect the district to the city. City Hall and Wall Street put exhibitors next to decision-makers and capital. Many buildings can host the Trade Mart, and New York itself becomes the testing ground and showcase. Available and New York’s seal the case.
FIDI ADVANTAGE
Transit
Transit
FIDI ADVANTAGE
Open Space
Open Space
FIDI ADVANTAGE
Logistics
Blue Highway
FIDI ADVANTAGE
Institutions
Institutions
FIDI ADVANTAGE
Flood Defense
Flood Defense
FIDI ADVANTAGE
Global Reach
Global Reach
Companies lease and operate that make their solutions tangible. Visitors walk through an energy-efficient apartment, explore a working urban farm, feel a cooler streetscape or try a simulated city operations center.
New York's exhibitions set the precedent. General Motors' Futurama in 1939 carried visitors over a vast model of future cities and highways. General Electric's Progressland in 1964–65 used a rotating theater to show electricity changing daily life.
Invent.City brings that approach to today's urban challenges. Each demonstration pairs the experience with evidence on performance, cost and maintenance, plus direct access to the suppliers who can deliver.
Transport
Reconfigure a full-scale street, then watch how curbs, micromobility, shuttles, charging, transit technology, and wayfinding reshape movement in real time.
Buildings
Turn up the heat, cut the power, and adjust controls inside occupied-room simulations to see how building systems protect comfort and continuity.
Power
Balance generation, storage, microgrids, charging, and demand from a live control room, then stage an outage to see which systems keep the district running.
Waste
Send materials through collection, sorting, composting, reuse, and energy recovery, tracing where contamination appears and where discarded material becomes a valuable input.
Agriculture
Harvest from working grow rooms, taste the output, and trace water, energy, compost, labor, and cold-chain decisions from seed to sale.
Consumer
Use low-waste products inside apartment, hotel, office, and retail settings, revealing how they perform where residents, guests, employees, and customers encounter them.
Energy
Combine solar, heat pumps, thermal storage, smart meters, and efficiency controls in a building-scale lab, then tune the system through changing demand.
Water
Trigger a cloudburst and heat wave across a working streetscape, then watch drainage, cooling, leak detection, irrigation, reuse, and flood protection respond together.
Wastewater
Follow a single stream through sensing, treatment, reuse, and nutrient recovery, seeing what can return safely to buildings, landscapes, or industry.
AI
Run a city digital twin from an immersive command center, testing permitting, emergency response, and daily operations as recommendations change under pressure.
Robotics
Direct inspection, delivery, cleaning, maintenance, and emergency robots through real street and building obstacles, exposing where autonomy succeeds, hesitates, or requires human judgment.
Logistics
Route one delivery from vessel to microhub, cargo bike, locker, and electric fleet, seeing how each handoff affects the curb and final mile.
Digital media, virtual showrooms and events extend the Trade Mart beyond FiDi and across time zones. Before a visit, buyers explore solutions online, find suppliers and book meetings. After, they revisit demonstrations, share them with colleagues and keep purchases and pilots moving.
Media attracts new audiences, events give buyers reasons to return, and virtual showrooms stay open around the clock. FiDi anchors a market that reaches well beyond the district.
A cluster needs room to grow, and FiDi has it. Cushman & Wakefield counted about of direct and sublease vacancy across the Financial East and Insurance submarkets in Q2 2026. Much of that space is poorly suited to housing.
The planning case assigns 1 Million Square Feet to Invent.City and 2 Million Square Feet to supporting offices. Existing space lets the cluster launch quickly, keep startup costs low and grow with demand.
remain important where buildings fit. For floors that are difficult to convert, showrooms offer another use, subject to lease terms, code requirements and buildout costs.
Current NYC Initiatives
Buyers commit when they see a solution working. FiDi's public projects provide the proof.
At Chambers Street, the MTA and NYC DCAS are exploring a thermal-energy system that could capture subway heat to serve nearby municipal buildings. FiDi also hosts a freight microhub, Blue Highway marine freight and coastal-resilience work.
Invent.City develops projects of its own and links public initiatives with suppliers, buyers and investors, so public investment builds a wider market for urban solutions.
The goal: make FiDi a model city. The Trade Mart is the first act of , one focused investment that spreads to streets, public space, transit and district systems. The growing cluster is its economic foundation.
Unlike greenfield cities built from scratch, FiDi retrofits a working district. That is the problem most of the world’s cities actually face.
Over time it adds housing, low-impact transportation and urban-agriculture jobs that supply neighborhood food markets, and it becomes a template for AI in city operations.
GREENFIELD VISION
NEOM
Built from zero.
GREENFIELD VISION
Telosa
Seeking a site.
CITY BENCHMARK
Singapore
Integrated systems.
CITY BENCHMARK
Curitiba
Transit planning.
MASTER-PLANNED DISTRICT
Masdar City
Low-carbon systems.
MASTER-PLANNED DISTRICT
Songdo
Smart systems.
FiDi becomes a real-world test site. In a dense, working district, companies demonstrate technologies in place while city teams evaluate them for purchase and wider use.
The lab connects clean energy, water reuse, rooftop food, car-free streets and mobility with neighborhood hubs for deliveries, waste and public toilets. Together, they show how a city works better.
Residents help decide what gets tested. FiDi is part of Community Board 1, near the Alfred E. Smith Houses, Chinatown, Battery Park City and Tribeca. Regular input from residents, businesses, property owners and public agencies guides the agenda and helps successful solutions scale.
The Trade Mart brings tenants, buyers and visitors to FiDi year-round, with potential for local businesses, demand for space and activity on neighborhood streets. A could connect the showrooms with places to walk, meet and spend time. Reclaiming the Streets and Vision Zero Reimagined offer further ideas for improving Lower Manhattan’s public space and street safety.
Four moves turn strategy into action. Build momentum with roundtables, a newsletter and the Future City exhibition. Fund growth in phases, matching risk to capital. Recruit the partners who deliver. Pick the FiDi sites where the market takes root.
Roundtables test demand one issue at a time, building on a 2023–2024 market test on micro cargo and urban hubs.
They follow the Trade Mart's structure: the industries that supply cities and the forces shaping their future. Each targets one risk or opportunity, and AI runs through all of them.
Each session brings buyers, suppliers and investors together around a single issue and publishes the buyer needs, potential pilots and next steps it identifies.
The series is set for early 2027.
Invent.City’s planned Future City exhibition shows how the decisions cities make today will shape life for generations.
Organized around twelve industries and the forces transforming cities, especially , it uses immersive visions of New York, Lagos and London in 2100 to explore and futures.
Funded primarily by sponsors, the exhibition gives companies a stage to demonstrate solutions and meet visitors, buyers, researchers and future Trade Mart exhibitors. The website and monthly newsletter extend its reach between visits and build participation in the exhibition, the Trade Mart and the cluster.
FiDi already draws the audience. The Downtown Alliance reports 11.3 million unique visitors to Lower Manhattan in 2024, people who neither work nor live downtown. The exhibition gives them a new reason to come: to experience the future of cities and meet the companies building it.
| Submarket | Address | Available Space | Details |
|---|---|---|---|
| Financial East | 28 Liberty Street | 186,469 SF | Class A tower; contact JLL for availability details. |
| Financial East | 17 State Street | 72,405 SF | Class A office tower at State and Pearl Streets. |
| Financial East | One New York Plaza | 35,382 SF | Class A office tower at the southern tip of Manhattan. |
| Insurance | 33 Maiden Lane | 24,200 SF | Full second floor; direct lease, rent negotiable. |
| Insurance | 125 Maiden Lane | 18,200 SF | Full 14th floor; direct lease, rent negotiable. |
Invent.City scores FiDi buildings and public spaces on visibility, access, flexibility, cost, ownership readiness and event capacity. A three-stage identifies anchor buildings and smaller sites for phased openings. The portfolio expands as demand is proven.
Cities test solutions against real needs. Suppliers reach buyers at scale. New York gains jobs, visitors and working space. The base case: 13,173 jobs and $2.4B a year in direct activity.
Base planning scenario: 13,173 jobs; $2.4B in annual direct economic activity; $219M in annual modeled taxes and fees; 700K annual visitors; and 3 Million Square Feet of real-estate capacity.
This is a planning scenario, not a forecast. Activity, taxes and visitor spending are annual flows. Space is capacity, and $71M is gross recurring capacity, not net new revenue. These measures describe different outcomes; do not add them.
| Base-case annual public revenue reconciliation | Amount |
|---|---|
| Tourism taxes and feesFrom 4.1, excluding tourism PIT | $ 86,751,875 |
| Trade Mart modeled public revenueFrom 4.2, including payroll-related and sales taxes | $ 132,569,719 |
| Gross recurring NYC real-estate revenue capacityFrom 4.3; gross capacity, not net incremental revenue | $ 70,675,722 |
How these numbers were built
The visitor case models volume, stay, spending, taxability and jobs. The Trade Mart case models area, job density, wages, procurement and tax rates. The real-estate case models rent, operating costs, capitalization, assessment, tax rates, phase-in and commercial rent tax.
Sections 4.1–4.3 publish the assumptions, formulas and sources. Existing assessments, taxes, exemptions, abatements and transitional values remain outside the real-estate estimate.
700K annual visitors $1.31B annual impact 6,173 supported jobs
| Tourism summary | Downside | Base | Upside |
|---|---|---|---|
| Annual visitorsFrom 4.1.2 Details: Table 1, Base assumptions | 400,000 | 700,000 | 1,000,000 |
| Traveler spending ($/yr)From 4.1.2 Details: Table 2A, Hotel and other traveler spending | $379,000,000 | $864,500,000 | $1,620,000,000 |
| Total economic impact ($/yr)From 4.1.2 Details: Table 2B, Total economic impact | $576,080,000 | $1,314,040,000 | $2,462,400,000 |
| Tourism-supported jobsFrom 4.1.2 Details: Table 3, Tourism-supported jobs | 2,706 | 6,173 | 11,567 |
| Modeled taxes and fees ($/yr, no PIT)From 4.1.2 Details: Table 4C, Tax totals roll-up | $38,518,438 | $86,751,875 | $160,889,063 |
| Rounded taxes and fees ($/yr, no PIT)From 4.1.2 Details: Table 4C, rounded grand total | $38.5M | $86.8M | $160.9M |
| Tourism PIT is excluded pending a separate tourism wage-and-residency model. Jobs scale with direct traveler spending using NYC's 2025 spending-to-jobs ratio. Scenarios assume 1.25 guests per occupied room and a 75% taxable share of non-hotel spending. | |||
7,000 on-site jobs $1.51B annual direct activity $132,569,719 modeled public revenue
| Trade Mart summary | Base |
|---|---|
| On-site jobs (1,000 showroom + 6,000 supporting offices)From 4.2.2 Details: Table 1, Jobs based on area | 7,000 |
| On-site payroll ($/yr)From 4.2.2 Details: Table 2B, Base-case payroll detail | $1,165,000,000 |
| Local procurement ($/yr)From 4.2.2 Details: Table 3, Local procurement | $349,500,000 |
| Total direct activity ($/yr)From 4.2.2 Details: Table 4, Direct campus activity | $1,514,500,000 |
| Note: Direct activity shown here is kept separate from tourism and real-estate modules to reduce double counting. | |
That 3 Million Square Feet is 1 Million Square Feet of Trade Mart plus the 2 Million Square Feet of supporting offices it draws. Invent.City puts empty space back to work in phases, not all at once.
3 MSF back to work $1.8B illustrative implied value $71M/yr gross capacity
| Real estate summary | Downside | Base | Upside |
|---|---|---|---|
| Stabilized leased area (sf)From 4.3.2 Details: Table 1, Leasing assumptions | 3,000,000 | 3,000,000 | 3,000,000 |
| Annual rent ($/yr)From 4.3.2 Details: Tables 1 and 1A, rent total | $165,000,000 | $165,000,000 | $165,000,000 |
| NOI ($/yr)From 4.3.2 Details: Table 2B, Total NOI on 3.0 MSF | $102,000,000 | $106,860,000 | $111,750,000 |
| Illustrative implied value at 6.0% cap ($)From 4.3.2 Details: Table 2C, Implied value from capitalized NOI | $1,700,000,000 | $1,781,000,000 | $1,862,500,000 |
| Modeled recurring NYC revenue capacity ($/yr)From 4.3.2 Details: Table 4C, Total modeled recurring NYC revenue capacity | $66,744,900 | $70,675,722 | $74,303,100 |
| Rounded recurring NYC revenue capacity ($/yr)From 4.3.2 Details: Table 4C, rounded total | $66.7M | $70.7M | $74.3M |
| Gross capacity is shown separately from modeled taxes and fees because current assessments, existing taxes, exemptions, abatements, and transitional values have not been deducted. | |||
