Group items tagged

The report "Innovation and the City" [PDF] is an important addition to our knowledge of urban policy innovation. It summarizes the results of a six-month research effort by policy researchers at New York University's Wagner School of Public Service and the New York-based Center for an Urban Future. The research team interviewed over 200 experts (including our own Emily Badger) and surveyed more than 120 policy innovations. (I should disclose here that I am Global Research Professor for the NYU School of Continuing and Professional Studies).

"About the Metropolitan Policy Program Created in 1996, the Brookings Institution Metropolitan Policy Program provides decision makers with timely trend analysis, cutting-edge research and policy ideas for improving the health and prosperity of cities and metropolitan areas. The program is based on a simple premise: The United States is a metropolitan nation. Metropolitan areas are home to 83 percent of the U.S. population, 85 percent of the nation's jobs and 92 percent of all college graduates. They are our hubs of research and innovation, our centers of human capital, and our gateways of trade and immigration. They are, in short, the drivers of our economy, and American competitiveness depends on their vitality. "

About the Metropolitan Policy Program Created in 1996, the Brookings Institution Metropolitan Policy Program provides decision makers with timely trend analysis, cutting-edge research and policy ideas for improving the health and prosperity of cities and metropolitan areas. The program is based on a simple premise: The United States is a metropolitan nation. Metropolitan areas are home to 83 percent of the U.S. population, 85 percent of the nation's jobs and 92 percent of all college graduates. They are our hubs of research and innovation, our centers of human capital, and our gateways of trade and immigration. They are, in short, the drivers of our economy, and American competitiveness depends on their vitality.

LSE Cities is an international centre at the London School of Economics and Political Science that carries out research, education and outreach activities in London and abroad. Its mission is to study how people and cities interact in a rapidly urbanising world, focussing on how the design of cities impacts on society, culture and the environment. Through research, conferences, teaching and projects, the centre aims to shape new thinking and practice on how to make cities fairer and more sustainable for the next generation of urban dwellers, who will make up some 70 per cent of the global population by 2050.

Hot spots is an Economist Intelligence Unit research programme, commissioned by Citigroup, which ranks the competitiveness of 120 of the world's major cities. The Economist Intelligence Unit bears sole responsibility for the content of this report. The Economist Intelligence Unit's editorial team built the Index, conducted the analysis and wrote the report. The findings and views expressed in this report do not necessarily reflect the views of the sponsor. Our research drew on two main initiatives: A unique Index that compares 120 of the world's major urban agglomerations across eight distinct categories of competitiveness and 31 individual indicators. These cities collectively represent about 29% of the global economy, with a combined GDP of US$20.24tr. A detailed note on definitions and methodology is provided in the appendix. We conducted in-depth interviews with ten city experts, mayors and corporate executives, to get their insights on city competitiveness.

policy and design research for urban computational systems in Amsterdam. VURB is a European framework for policy and design research concerning urban computational systems. The VURB foundation, based in Amsterdam, provides direction and resources to a portfolio of projects investigating how our cultures might come to use networked digital resources to change the way we understand, build, and inhabit cities.

CLUI is a research organization involved in exploring, examining, and understanding land and landscape issues.

Land Use

Research of Shlomo Angel at the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy. Comprehensive Atlas on Urban Expansion and Densities 1800-now. useful.

Expansion / Densification

In his just-released Planet of Cities, Shlomo Angel argues that urban policy-makers and planners must do more to meet the challenge of urbanization. Angel, who is a member of the Urbanization Project at New York University and who conducted his research as a visiting fellow at the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy, provides a detailed, data-driven analysis filled with maps of world urbanization patterns, as well as charts and tables documenting the challenges facing global cities. He took time out from his busy schedule to talk to Atlantic Cities about the key challenges facing our increasingly urban world.

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:

The complexity of participation: learning from slum dweller mobilisation in Dar es Salaam Putting the practice of resident participation in displacement planning under the microscope, Michael Hooper provides six practical lessons for implementing a participation programme that recognises the differences between residents and makes all their voices count, based on research in Dar es Salaam.

Getting the right city density - generally expressed in the US as people per square mile or homes per acre - to support sustainable and pleasant living is one of the trickiest problems we face as we address the future of our communities. The typically low densities of suburban sprawl built in the last half of the 20th century, despite their popularity at the time with a considerable share of the market, have been shown by a voluminous body of research to produce unsustainable rates of driving, carbon emissions, pollution. stormwater runoff, and adverse health impacts.

City Design at MIT - The Joint Program in City Design and Development/CDD is is an academic program, a research community, and a forum for debating propositions about the future of city form.

Last year, I spent considerable time researching best practices for climate resilient cities--an endeavor that culminated in what I believe was the first ever global ranking of resilient cities. Now, after extensive research on smart cities initiatives around the globe, I have developed what may be the first ever global rankings of smart cities.

This is the website of the research lab of Sciences Po on cities.

Open knowledge repository (World BanK)

UNALIS - library catalogue Use also for Journals etc

Conference Series on the Future of Cities

The World Digital Library is connected to libraries worldwide and provides free access to a large number of materials.

Jstor offers a comprehensive collection of journals and other sources with scholarly content. Although it is based on a paid subscription and partnership with institutions and libraries, one can still access full texts of early journal content for free. Some libraries have full access to this source.

Database for searching Journals