The world's urban population doubled between 1970 and 2008, growing from 1.5 billion to 3 billion people. Future world population growth will be concentrated in developing countries-the majority in medium-size and smaller cities and towns. International institutions and governments alike face...

This book takes a look at the past to gain insights for the future. Nearly 30 years ago, when the world urban population was only about half of the 3 billion that it is today, when most Less Developed Countries (LDCs) were primarily rural, and before the wave of decentralization of the 1980s and...

This book, Financing cities, emphasized case studies on different topics to look at the interactions of a range of variables and factors and to see how they fit together. Rather than require each case to follow the same format, the authors have structured their papers around the issues that...

The author examines the role of private participation in infrastructure (PPI) in mobilizing finance for key urban services, that is, urban roads, municipal solid waste management, and water and sanitation since the early 1990s when private participation came to be seen as a key element in...

This paper examines international experience with mobilizing funding for both capital and recurrent costs for municipal infrastructure with a view to identifying areas where India could improve its system of financing infrastructure in cities. Based on international data, the analysis shows that...

This paper examines the policy options for India as it seeks to improve living conditions of the poor on a large scale and reduce the population in slums. Addressing the problem requires first a diagnosis of the market at the city level and a recognition that government interventions, rather...

This paper assesses the state of research and examines priorities for future work in the area of urbanization and growth. This is done by reviewing and summarizing the findings of five scoping papers covering the following topics: urban poverty, the political economy of urban poverty, urban real...