Students from across the Global Network for Advanced Management will travel next week to Quito, Ecuador, for a Global Network Week held in conjunction with the United Nations Habitat III Conference, a conference held once every 20 years to address problems associated with urbanization.

The week in Quito, hosted in conjunction with the Rockefeller Foundation’s 100 Resilient Cities program, will be led by faculty members from the Sauder School of Business, Haas School of Business, Yale School of Management, INCAE Business School, and FGV in Brazil. Traditionally, each Global Network Week has been hosted by a single member school on its home campus.

Teams of students have been divided into teams assessing four challenges currently facing the city’s chief resiliency officer, and will be tasked with creating actionable plans to address them by the end of the week. Unlike other Network Weeks, students have already been collaborating in virtual teams to discuss how they will work together on the ground when they arrive in the city.

Matt O’Rourke, senior communications writer at Yale SOM, will be traveling with the students and documenting their experiences. Members of the Global Network community are encouraged to join us on Facebook and Twitter to contribute their ideas and observations about urban resiliency in their home countries.

The students’ projects include:

• Quito Cables: Shape an urban and economic model that helps turn neighborhoods near a new transit line into thriving communities.
• Quito Historic Center: Find new ways to encourage more residents of the city to live and work in the historic city center, while looking for opportunities to boost tourism and other activities at the site.
• Calderón Metropolitan Park: Create a management solution that allows this park in the arid northern area of Quito to operate through self-financing, leveraged by its agriculture, tourism, and energy potential. 
• Commonwealth of the bioregion of Chocó-Andino: Offer plans to address environmental and economic sustainability issues surrounding an open mining pit for metals.