The impact of urban form on economic performance and quality of life has been extensively recognized. The studies on urban form have focused in developed countries; only a few cities in developing countries have been studied. This paper utilizes nighttime lights imagery and information on street...

Cover -- Title -- Copyright -- Contents -- Acknowledgments -- Overview Africa's Cities: Opening Doors to the World -- The low development trap - Africa's urban economies are limited to nontradable goods and services -- Crowded, disconnected, and thus costly - Africa's cities are limited to...

Cities in Sub-Saharan Africa are experiencing rapid population growth. Yet their economic growth has not kept pace. Why? One factor might be low capital investment, due in part to Africa's relative poverty: Other regions have reached similar stages of urbanization at higher per capita GDP. This...

The rapid, unplanned urbanisation in Haiti creates a series of urban mobility challenges which can contribute to job market fragmentation and decrease the quality of life in the city. Data on population and job distributions, and on home-work commuting patterns in major urban centres are scarce....

This paper examines the linkages between urban form and city productivity, using alternative metrics for urban form and applying them to a comprehensive sample of Latin American cities. Although most of the literature has concentrated on the effects of population density (compact versus...

This paper provides the first systematic empirical assessment of the pace at which housing investment has responded to rising demand from urbanization. The assessment used national accounts statistics to build a data set of residential housing investment for more than 90 countries. The data set...

In our rapidly urbanizing world, mayors often see migrants as a burden to their city's labor market and a threat to its development. Drawing on national household surveys and four secondary city case studies in Africa, this study finds that migrants, being younger, better educated and/or...