Urban areas are now home to more than half the population of OECD countries. Megacities like Tokyo with more than 35 million people and Mexico with about 18.5 million, and large agglomerations such as Montreal, Helsinki, Madrid and Stockholm are often called "engines of national growth." They...

Urban areas represent an important part of the national economy and feature higher GDP per capita and productivity levels than their country’s average. But they also harbour large pockets of unemployment and poverty and suffer from problems such as congestion, pollution and crime. This book...

Core Cities is an association of eleven cities in the UK: Belfast, Birmingham, Bristol, Cardiff, Glasgow, Leeds, Liverpool, Manchester, Newcastle, Nottingham, and Sheffield. Altogether, Core Cities and their surrounding regions account for around one quarter of the UK population and economy....

The report provides an outline of recent and likely future urbanisation trends and discusses the consequences. The world is in the middle of an urbanisation process that will cause urbanisation rates to rise from low double digit rates to more than 80% by the end of the century. It argues that...

This report compares urbanisation trends in OECD countries on the basis of a newly defined OECD methodology which enables cross-country comparison of the socio-econimic and environmental performance of metropolitan areas in OECD countries. The methodology is presented and results from its...

In OECD countries, metropolitan areas often enjoy above-average rates of growth; they compete for foreign direct investment, have a leading position in the knowledge-based economy, and attract a disproportionately large share of immigrants. Yet they also are burdened with many problems including...