For African cities to grow economically as they have grown in size, they must create productive environments to attract investments, increase economic efficiency, and create livable environments that prevent urban costs from rising with increased population densification. What are the central...

The Malawi Urbanization Review aims to provide fresh perspectives on urbanization in Malawi, by analyzing the current and potential contribution of urbanization to long-term national development and the current institutional and financial capacity of local governments to manage the process....

The fast and often chaotic urbanization of the developing world generates both economic opportunity and challenges, like contagious disease and congestion, because proximity increases both positive and negative externalities. In this paper, we review the expanding body of economic research on...

Cities can be thought of as the absence of physical space between people and firms. As such, they exist to eliminate transportation costs for goods, people and ideas and transportation technologies dictate urban form. In the 21st century, the dominant form of city living is based on the...

The 1990s were an unusually good decade for the largest American cities and, in particular, for the cities of the Midwest. However, fundamentally urban growth in the 1990s looked extremely similar to urban growth during the prior post-war decades. The growth of cities was determined by three...

Despite impressive economic growth and increasing prosperity, cities in Mexico do not seem to have fully captured the benefits of urban agglomeration, in part because of rapid and uncoordinated urban growth. Recent expansion of many Mexican cities has been distant, disconnected, and dispersed,...

The downsides of density, including traffic congestion, contagious disease and crime, were common in Victorian London and classical Rome, just as they are today in Sao Paulo and Lagos. Our urban past provides lessons for developing world cities today. The first lesson, that I highlight, is that...

This report is organized in four sections. Section one provides an overview of the context in which many ECA cities consolidated. This section includes a review of the key factors that shaped the urban systems of ECA, including a discussion of the implication of urbanizing under planned...