Looking for Gold in Urban Research

A spate of recent books and reports remind us that the economic future and social well being of mankind not to mention the health of the planet, is inextricably linked with urbanization. That cities drive GDP growth has been apparent from the national accounts for decades but it is only two years ago that a majority of the world's population began to live and work in cities. Having discovered - or rediscovered - the central role of cities and recognizing that the trends point inexorably towards continuing urbanization and the emergence of many more megacities, researchers are attempting to determine how urbanization can be managed so as to enhance sustainable growth rates, improve the quality of life in cities, and contain or better still reverse the diseconomies stemming from congestion, pollution, GHG emissions, urban sprawl and the increased consumption of non-renewable resources.

The publications listed here provide a broad and accessible sampling of recent research. There is certainly a lot to chew on and some of it is entertaining stuff. But for those who have been following the field and are on the lookout for 'disruptive' findings and policy breakthroughs, the pickings remain slim. Empirical deepening has occurred and we now have a wealth of detailed cross country initiatives to draw upon, but the national planner or city manager wanting to accelerate and improve the quality of urban development must continue to make do with some fairly standard policy prescriptions.

Raising urban growth rates still requires measures to ease constraints on investment and on new starts; attracting and retaining talented people and entrepreneurs; creating an affordable and pleasing living environment efficiently supplied with services and well connected with other urban centers; and for the larger cities, growth prospects can be enhanced by extracting the maximum advantage from agglomeration economies to build a diversified system powered by a number of industrial clusters.

The problems of sprawl, pollution and GHG emissions can in principle be tackled through: zoning - and making a city more compact by expanding vertically; property taxes; allowing market prices to influence decisions and efficiently allocate and conserve resources; and the effective planning of the public transport infrastructure together with the pricing of transport usage.

Far sighted planning of urban development and the making and implementing of sound policies remains a function of: leadership at the national level and at the level of the municipality; the quality of governance buttressed by capable public employees and well functioning partnerships with the private sector; center-local fiscal relations and local financing arrangements that adequately support expenditure assignments; bi-level technology policies supporting local innovation; and institutional mechanisms for coordinating business government relationships as well as coordinating intra metropolitan decisions regarding taxation, infrastructure, and housing for example.

For anyone with the stamina to trawl through some hundreds of pages, these publications are an immensely rewarding read and packed with examples drawn from every corner of the world. Clearly we still have a lot to learn but already it is indubitable that growth is tightly intertwined with with the pace and characteristics of urbanization and cities must become a major focus of growth economics.

References:
UN Habitat. State of the World's Cities 2010/2011. UN, Nairobi. 2008.
Edward l. Glaeser. Triumph of the City. Penguin Press. New York. 2011.
Matthew E. Kahn. Climatopolis. Basic Books. New York. 2010.
John D. Kasarda and Greg Lindsay. Aerotropolis. Farrar, Straus and Giroux. New York. 2011.
Earl Ray Hutchison ed. Encyclopedia of Urban Studies. Sage Publications. 2009.
Brookings Institution. Global Metro Monitor. Washington DC. 2010.
Boston Consulting Group. Winning in Emerging Market Cities. Boston. 2010.