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...

Eurasian cities, unique in the global spatial landscape, were part of the world's largest experiment in urban development. The challenges they now face because of their history offer valuable lessons to urban planners and policymakers across the world from places that are still urbanizing to...

Approaches to urban slums are a multimedia sourcebook that comprises 14 self-running audiovisual presentations and 18 video interviews. It is organized into four broad sections: adaptive approaches, proactive approaches, case profiles, and thematic interviews. The sourcebook itself, which...

This paper provides evidence from eight developing countries of an inverse relationship between poverty and city size. Poverty is both more widespread and deeper in very small and small towns than in large or very large cities. This basic pattern is generally robust to choice of poverty line....

This paper utilizes a countrywide, county-to-city upgrade in the 1990s to identify whether extending the powers of urban local governments leads to better firm outcomes. The paper hypothesizes that since local leaders in newly-promoted cities have an incentive to utilize their new administrative...

The authors use detailed ethnographic evidence to design and interpret a broad representative survey of 800 households in Delhi's slums, examining the processes by which residents gain access to formal government and develop their own informal modes of leadership. While ethnically homogeneous...

In recent years an extensive body of literature has emerged on the definition, measurement and analysis of poverty. Much of this literature focuses on analyzing poverty at the national level, or spatial disaggregation by general categories of urban or rural areas with adjustments made for...