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Global Urbanization surveys essential dimensions of this growth and begins to formulate a global urban agenda for the next half century. Drawing from many disciplines, the contributors tackle issues ranging from how cities can keep up with fast-growing housing needs to the possibilities for public-private partnerships in urban governance. Several essays address the role that cutting-edge technologies such as GIS software, remote sensing, and predictive growth models can play in tracking and forecasting urban growth. Reflecting the central importance of the Global South to twenty-first-century urbanism, the volume includes case studies and examples from China, India, Uganda, Kenya, and Brazil. While the challenges posed by large-scale urbanization are immense, the future of human development requires that we find ways to promote socially inclusive growth, environmental sustainability, and resilient infrastructure. The timely and relevant scholarship assembled in Global Urbanization will be of great interest to scholars and policymakers in demography, geography, urban studies, and international development.

On population growth and family planning: Bill Ryerson: Well, you brought up Population Media Center. One of the things that we do - and that is the primary thing we do - is to use a strategy of communications that has turned out, from everything we have been able to measure, to be the most cost-effective strategy for changing behavior with regard to family size and contraceptive use on a per-behavior change basis of any strategy we have found on the planet. And this is the use of long-running serialized dramas, melodramas like soap operas, in which characters gradually evolve from the middle of the road in that society into positive role models for daughter education, delaying marriage and childbearing until adulthood, spacing of children, limiting of family size, and various other health and social goals of each country. And we have now done such programs in forty-five countries. And I can give you a couple of statistics. For example, in northern Nigeria, a program we ran from 2007 to 2009 was listened to by 70% of the population at least weekly. It was a twice a week program. It was clearly a smash hit. And it was a smash hit because it was highly suspenseful and highly entertaining. But it had a storyline dealing with a couple deciding to use family planning, which is almost taboo in northern Nigeria because less than 10% of the people in that region use any modern method of contraception. We had eleven clinics have healthcare workers ask clients what had motivated them to come in for family planning, and 67% percent of them named the program as the motivation.

One of the problems I have with a lot of what passes for smart infill development - on the whole, a good thing - is that parks and green space are treated as afterthoughts at best, and frequently ignored altogether.

THIS blog often makes the argument that Britain's planning laws all too often restrict and prevent investment which might create economic growth. It is worth remembering occasionally that things were once much worse. For proof of that, see this fascinating post on Birmingham's economy in the 1950s and 1960s, by Henry Overman, of the LSE's Spatial Economics Research Centre. It's worth reading the whole thing, but a cut down version of the post is copied below:

Two laws on city size / growth.