This analysis shows where action is urgent and opportunity greatest—so cities, industry, and investors can prioritize. The urban market could reach roughly $43.3 trillion a year; climate damages, roughly $32 trillion by mid-century. Yet three decades of
have delivered pledges over action,
,
and the world still tracks toward 
Amsterdam / Brussels. A major exhibition and convention complex for trade fairs, conferences, product launches, and international business events.
1. MISSION
Make New York’s FiDi the World Capital for Urban Solutions.
More people live in cities than at any point in human history, and the number climbs every year. Those cities face and the at once, and they cannot buy their way out: the solutions exist, but they are scattered across continents, unproven at city scale, and almost impossible to compare side by side. Invent City turns vacant FiDi offices into the world’s permanent marketplace for urban solutions.
11,224 jobs counted once
$2.5B direct annual activity
$315M public revenue + capacity
Illustrative annual impact at full buildout, which follows demand and is expected by 2035.
Objectives
Accelerate urban solutions worldwide, starting with the most urgent: climate and AI.
Build a new growth engine for New York: companies, talent, investment, visitors, and jobs.
SHOW
TEST
COMPARE
FINANCE
BUY
DEPLOY
SCALE
2. STRATEGY
Create a Trade Mart. Spark an Urban Solutions Cluster.
This analysis shows where action is urgent and opportunity greatest—so cities, industry, and investors can prioritize. The urban market could reach roughly $43.3 trillion a year; climate damages, roughly $32 trillion by mid-century. Yet three decades of have delivered pledges over action, , and the world still tracks toward 2.3–2.5°C of warming. proves the first-mover prize: the top auto exporter, dominant in solar, and closing the AI gap while cutting costs. Climate action is not only about “saving the planet.” It is a race for the technologies, industries, jobs, investment, and market share that will build the next generation of cities.
The opportunity and the risk are of comparable scale: a $43.3T urban market alongside as much as $32T in annual climate damage. The winners will be the places that turn those problems into industries.
Demand starts with four forces: Planet + Resources, Technology + Infrastructure, People + Society, and Economy + Geopolitics. Two will hit hardest. is rewriting city operations—from infrastructure, mobility, and utilities to buildings and public services—while adding risks from cyberattacks, autonomous systems, and failures at city scale. offers no physical upside: heat, water stress, floods, and extreme weather will drive enormous costs and force investment in cooling, resilient power, coastal protection, drainage, and water systems. Together, AI and climate will redefine what cities need, what they buy, and which industries grow.
PLANET +
RESOURCES
Energy Trends
Air Temperature
TECHNOLOGY +
INFRASTRUCTURE
AI Customers
AI Uses
EV Takeup
PEOPLE +
SOCIETY
Population
Developing Markets
Migration Trends
ECONOMY +
GEOPOLITICS
The Gap
Chasm
Hotspots
Bringing buyers and sellers together turns innovation into deployment. A is a permanent B2B marketplace where companies, city buyers, investors, policymakers, and other stakeholders meet around working solutions. Proven worldwide, it operates year-round—not for one trade-show week—making technologies visible, testable, comparable, and easier to buy, from AI building controls to clean-energy systems. It becomes the place decision-makers return to see what is new, meet suppliers, and evaluate solutions in context. New York gains companies, investment, jobs, and visitors; owners turn vacancy into high-value activity that strengthens demand, rents, and property value.
RAI
Amsterdam / Brussels
Chelsea Harbour
London
The Mart
Chicago
D&D Shopping
Sao Paulo
World Trade Mart
Dallas / Austin
Pacific Design Center
Los Angeles
World Trade Centre
Dubai
Big Sight
Tokyo
NECC
Shanghai
Hannover Messe
Hanover
AmericasMart
Atlanta
Messe
Frankfurt
FiDi combines location, infrastructure, space, institutional strength, and global recognition. It concentrates capital, government, finance, media, talent, and corporate decision-making; dense transit reaches the city and region, while the waterfront and emerging Blue Highway open to the harbor and beyond. Roughly 10.8 million square feet of vacant office and retail space can house the Trade Mart now—no new construction—making FiDi a living lab and showcase. This complements residential conversion: showrooms, demonstrations, labs, and commercial uses open far faster at a fraction of the cost, generating near-term returns while preserving flexible space for future demand.
Showrooms make the Trade Mart tangible. They let buyers see, test, compare, and trust urban technology in a real city—buildings, streets, infrastructure, utilities, and people included. AR, VR, projection, digital twins, displays, and live data show how buildings, microgrids, mobility, water, robotics, and logistics perform under changing conditions. Tailored to each buyer’s city, budget, risks, and goals, they build engagement, education, emotional connection, sharing, understanding, and confidence. Urban systems reinforce one another—energy with buildings, AI with transportation, water with resilience, logistics with streets—creating informed buyers, more sales, and faster deployment.
Vacancy is not FiDi’s weakness—it is a strategic asset. New Class A offices at Hudson Yards and the World Trade Center leave older buildings east of Broadway unlikely to recover through conventional leasing. works only where floorplates, cores, light, and economics support housing. Invent City activates the rest: deep-floorplate offices, vacant retail, institutional space, alleys, POPS, and transit areas become showrooms, demonstrations, labs, and productive uses. They open far faster at far lower cost, generate revenue sooner, and grow with demand. Shell-and-core space stays flexible without blocking redevelopment. Invent City puts existing FiDi space to work now.
By 2040, FiDi can become a working showcase for the future of cities. Streets, plazas, waterfront connections, underused spaces, and historic corridors can support demonstrations, events, mobility pilots, climate infrastructure, public art, dining, and daily commerce. The images below offer a tour of how these places could form a connected public realm serving residents, workers, visitors, buyers, and international delegations.
The Trade Mart is more than a destination—it is a global market engine. FiDi provides the physical hub; events, media, virtual showrooms, intelligence, and AI extend it . Buyers discover solutions, sellers build relationships, investors find opportunities, and deals move from introduction to deployment across every time zone. Physical space gives Invent City gravity. The platform gives it global reach. The Mart never closes.
3. TACTICS
Build the Market Now. Build Out the District Next.
Recurring roundtables turn New York’s challenges into deployable solutions, tying AI, climate risk, affordability, and infrastructure to the city’s stated priorities: NYC Groceries, housing, transportation, Blue Highways, and energy storage. Invent City is the mechanism — the place where the city can see, compare, test, finance, buy, and deploy what turns stated policy into working systems.
ROUNDTABLE HIGHLIGHTS
- AI — from promise to deployment. How AI is reshaping city operations, infrastructure, buildings, mobility, logistics, and public services, and what cities need to test, govern, and scale it responsibly.
- ENERGY — the power system cities need next. Cheaper renewables, distributed generation, storage, electrification, microgrids, and smarter grids, judged on reliability, resilience, cost, and what cities can deploy now.
- CLIMATE — rising risk into action. Practical solutions for extreme heat, flooding, sea-level rise, water stress, storms, and infrastructure vulnerability, connecting risk directly to investment, procurement, and new urban markets.
An evolving public exhibit that makes the future of cities tangible: working solutions, prototypes, research, scenarios, and stories from New York and around the world.
New York, 2100
Lagos, 2100
London, 2100
Attract investors to finance Invent City itself, individual showrooms, real estate activation, demonstrations, and projects. Connect capital directly to companies and buyers so solutions move from interest to deployment. Contact tom@invent.city.
Recruit city, state, federal, and international public partners as buyers, problem owners, regulators, funders, and hosts for demonstrations and pilots.
Engage nonprofits to identify needs, build evidence, convene communities, represent users, and connect Invent City to projects and buyers worldwide.
International
- C40 Cities
- ICLEI
- World Resources Institute
- RMI
- The Climate Group
New York City Area
- Transportation Alternatives
- Lower East Side Ecology Center
- Urban Green Council
- Regional Plan Association
- Open Plans
- Center for an Urban Future
Recruit companies that sell, buy, finance, insure, design, install, and operate urban solutions. Founding partners bring products, customer demand, implementation capacity, and credibility.
- Transportation
- Buildings
- Power
- Waste
- Agriculture
- Consumer
- Energy
- Water
- Wastewater
- AI
- Robotics
- Logistics
100%
Score FiDi buildings and public spaces on visibility, access, flexibility, cost, ownership readiness, and event capacity. Open where Invent City can start fastest and matter most.
Scoring FiDi Addresses
Candidate buildings and public spaces across the Financial District, ranked on how fast each could open and how much visibility it would carry.
4. BENEFITS
Cities Get Solutions. New York Gets a New Economic Engine.
For the world. Cities need AI and climate solutions fast, but they struggle to find them, compare them, and buy them with any confidence. Invent City closes that gap by putting the products, the buyers, and the capital in one place, year-round. A resilience system shown in FiDi gets specified in Lagos. A grid technology financed in New York ends up running in Jakarta. The market does the work that conferences cannot.
For New York. Vacant floors become showrooms. Showrooms draw buyers. Buyers draw the companies that sell to them, and those companies stay — bringing jobs, payroll, tourism, and tax revenue to a district that has been losing all four since the offices emptied. This is not a building, and it is not a subsidy — it pays for itself. It is a new economic engine for the city that invented the modern skyline.
700K annual visitors
$1.5B modeled impact
4,224 supported jobs
| Tourism summary | Low | Mid | High |
|---|---|---|---|
| Annual visitorsFrom 4.1.2 Details: Table 1, Base assumptions | 400,000 | 700,000 | 1,000,000 |
| Traveler spending ($/yr)From 4.1.2 Details: Table 2A, Hotel and other traveler spending | $414,000,000 | $944,125,000 | $1,768,750,000 |
| Total economic impact ($/yr)From 4.1.2 Details: Table 2B, Total economic impact | $641,700,000 | $1,463,393,750 | $2,741,562,500 |
| Tourism-supported jobsFrom 4.1.2 Details: Table 3, Tourism-supported jobs | 2,414 | 4,224 | 6,034 |
| Modeled taxes and fees ($/yr, no PIT)From 4.1.2 Details: Table 4C, Tax totals roll-up | $49,473,750 | $111,468,438 | $206,796,875 |
| Rounded taxes and fees ($/yr, no PIT)From 4.1.2 Details: Table 4C, rounded grand total | $49,500,000 | $111,500,000 | $206,800,000 |
| Note: PIT excluded to avoid double counting with City Trade Mart payroll impacts. Jobs scale with visitor count (6,034 per 1M visitors). Low/Mid/High vary both visitor volume (400K/700K/1M) and spending rates. | |||
7,000 direct jobs
$1.2B direct payroll
$1.5B direct activity
| City Trade Mart summary | Mid |
|---|---|
| Direct on-site jobsFrom 4.2.2 Details: Table 1, Jobs based on area | 7,000 |
| Direct payroll ($/yr)From 4.2.2 Details: Table 2B, Mid-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. | |
3M sf back to work
$1.8B implied asset value
$70M/yr revenue capacity
| Real estate summary | Low | Mid | High |
|---|---|---|---|
| Stabilized leased area (sf)From 4.3.2 Details: Table 1, Leasing assumptions | 3,000,000 | 3,000,000 | 3,000,000 |
| Annual rent ($/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 3.0M sf | $111,750,000 | $106,860,000 | $102,000,000 |
| Illustrative implied value at 6.0% cap ($)From 4.3.2 Details: Table 2C, Implied value from capitalized NOI | $1,862,500,000 | $1,781,000,000 | $1,700,000,000 |
| Modeled recurring NYC revenue capacity ($/yr)From 4.3.2 Details: Table 4C, Total modeled recurring NYC revenue capacity | $69,704,500 | $70,675,890 | $71,313,250 |
| Rounded recurring NYC revenue capacity ($/yr)From 4.3.2 Details: Table 4C, rounded total | $69,700,000 | $70,700,000 | $71,300,000 |
| Note: This module is kept separate to avoid double counting with jobs, tourism, and construction modules. | |||
