What I Got Wrong About Cities: Reflections from CID’s Urban Mobility and Climate Change Conference

Growing up in Jakarta, I knew the city mostly from the back seat of a car. The angkot packed with passengers, the ojek drivers waiting in clusters, the motorcycles multiplying until they felt like the city's real circulatory system. I never took the angkot; I was told it wasn't safe, a caution I didn't think to question. What I also did not question was the car itself, the assumption that private vehicles were simply how we moved, even as the city's air thickened and floods came more often and stayed longer. That version of the city-- observed, filtered, at a remove-- was the one I carried with me to the Harvard Center for International Development’s Urban Mobility and Climate Change conference on March 5-6, 2026.

Engines of Connections, Systems of Inequality

On the first morning of the conference, I wrote at the top of my notebook: “connectivity reduces cost.”

Over the next two days, I took in conversations that kept returning to the same uncomfortable edge. Not a rejection of economic theory, but a slow expansion of it. One that kept surfacing the same basic question: what does it actually mean to be connected in a city?

One answer came through repeatedly, in different forms: cities are engines of connection, but those connections are never distributed equally. Mobility determines who can reach jobs, schools, and services, but it also determines who waits longer, makes more transfers, absorbs pollution, and ends up navigating systems never designed with them in mind. That tension, between connection and exclusion, between infrastructure and inequality, felt to me like one of the conference's central insights.

This idea first took shape during the opening panel on the Ugandan taxi sector, moderated by CID Faculty Affiliate and conference co-host Gabriel Kreindler. Researchers and practitioners described a system often labeled informal, yet in practice highly organized. Routes, payments, and access were negotiated continuously among drivers, operators, and state actors, not fixed by infrastructure or policy. What looks inefficient from a distance, fragmented routes, cash transactions, and contested stops, was a system working according to its own logic, shaped by real incentives and real constraints. Connectivity, the panel suggested, is not something infrastructure delivers. It is something people produce, through coordination and adaptation, often without formal recognition.

A subsequent talk on informal transport in African cities pushed this idea further. Mobility there was not a flow but a series of fragments, with multiple transfers, long waits, and uncertain connections. Vehicles spend nearly half their time parked rather than moving. At first, this could be read as waste. But the longer I sat with it, the more it seemed like adaptation: operators managing demand under uncertainty, rationally, even if the system bears the cost. For passengers, mobility is not only a financial expense; it is time, unpredictability, and the accumulated effort of navigating systems that were not built with them in mind.

Connectivity, in other words, is not simply about reducing cost. It is about how cost gets distributed.

Who Bears the Cost of Movement

This concept ran through everything that followed. In his keynote, Harvard economist and CID faculty affiliate Ed Glaeser described cities as machines to connect us, engines of interaction and economic opportunity. 

But the evidence presented across the conference kept complicating that picture. Richer populations move faster, more reliably, with fewer transfers. Poorer ones take longer journeys, deal with more uncertainty, and face greater exposure to environmental harm. 

A session on firm location and pollution exposure in African cities made the distribution of that cost concrete: firms cluster near roads for accessibility, while workers bear the pollution. The financial benefits flow upward; the environmental costs settle downward. From an economic perspective, this is a trade-off. In practice, it becomes a pattern.

A session on heat exposure in transit sharpened this further. Roughly 86% of heat exposure occurs during walking time, the last mile to and from stops, the part of the journey that barely registers in formal models. But it is where the city is most physically present: in the heat, the absence of shade, and the distance between where the bus stops and where you need to be. Mobility is not only a question of time and cost. It is experienced in the body, step by step.

Climate change is a critical reality that runs through all of this. Transport systems generate the emissions that warm the climate, while floods and extreme heat disrupt the very systems people depend on to move. Roads enable economic development, but they also impose pollution costs and reshape who bears them. The compounding falls hardest on those with the least insulation from it.

Returning to Jakarta, Differently

On the second day of the conference, there was a panel on Jakarta that I found difficult to sit through in a way I had not expected. Researchers and senior city officials, including the head of Jakarta's regional development planning agency and the director of operations at TransJakarta, were speaking about route optimization, transit coverage, and how the city moves its people. 

I found myself not following the policy logic but thinking instead about what those words had meant growing up there: a city where the default was a private vehicle, where public transit felt like someone else's system, while the same air sat over all of us. The panel was describing how to move Jakarta toward something less carbon-intensive, more equitable. I kept thinking about how much of my own childhood mobility had been part of what made that necessary. What the panel named in data, I recognized in memory—and in complicity.

At the end of the two days, I went back to the sentence I had written on the first morning and crossed it out. In its place: “connectivity redistributes cost.”

It is a small revision, but it points to what the original missed. Connectivity is not a neutral good that flows from infrastructure investment. It is a process that allocates access and burden, speed and exposure, opportunity and risk across populations and places that are never equally positioned to absorb what gets distributed to them. To study mobility is not only to study efficiency. It is to study how cities decide, often without saying so, who moves easily and who does not.

Rema Hanna closed the conference by reminding us that while research is necessary, it is never sufficient. That you also have to get the technical right: the politics, the financing, and whether cities have the institutional capacity to carry solutions through. It brought me back to how I experienced Jakarta back then- through the car window. Research can name what we couldn’t see, but the harder work is deciding what to do with that.

As Jane Jacobs once wrote, cities have the capability of providing something for everybody, but only when they are created by everybody. The question is not simply how we connect cities, but whether those connections are built in ways that allow people to move through them with dignity, safety, and possibility.