This paper explores the challenges and opportunities that government officials face in designing coherent' rules of the game' for achieving urban sustainability during times of growth. Sustainability is judged by three criteria. The first involves elements of day-to-day quality of life, such as...

This paper focuses on three interrelated questions on urbanization and the geography of development. First, although we herald cities with their industrial bases as "engines of growth," does industrialization in fact drive urbanization? While such relationships appear in the data, the process is...

Many cities in developing economies, particularly in Africa, are experiencing urbanization without industrialization. This paper conceptualizes this in a framework in which a city can produce non-tradable goods and -- if it is sufficiently competitive -- also internationally tradable goods,...

Since the industrial revolution, the economic development of Western Europe and North America was characterized by continuous urbanization accompanied by a gradual phasing-in of urban land property rights over time. Today, however, the evidence in many fast urbanizing low-income countries points...

Rapid urbanization in Sub-Saharan Africa places immense pressure on urban services to meet the needs of the burgeoning urban population. Although several country- or city-level reports offer insight into the housing challenges of specific places, little is known about regional patterns affecting...

Urban areas tend to have much more productive labor and higher salaries than rural areas, and there are vast differences across urban areas. Areas with high salaries and high productivity tend to have employers that invest in much more research and development than areas with low salaries and...

Urbanization is undoubtedly a key driver of development -- cities provide the national platform for prosperity, job creation, and poverty reduction. But urbanization also poses enormous challenges that one is familiar with: congestion, air pollution, social divisions, crime, the breakdown of...

Urbanization deserves urgent attention from policy makers, academics, entrepreneurs, and social reformers of all stripes. Nothing else will create as many opportunities for social and economic progress. The urbanization project began roughly 1,000 years after the transition from the Pleistocene...

This paper examines the effects of urbanization on development and growth. It begins with a labor market perspective and emphasizes the importance of agglomeration economies, both static and dynamic. It then argues that more productive jobs in cities do not exist in a void and underscores the...

In the past dozen years, a literature has developed arguing that urbanization has unfolded differently in post-independence Sub-Saharan Africa than in the rest of the developing world, with implications for African economic growth overall. While African countries are more urbanized than other...