Regenerating Urban LandThe Urban Development Series discusses the challenge of urbanization and what it will mean for developing countries in the decades ahead. The Series aims to delve substantively into the core issues framed by the World Bank's 2009 Urban Strategy, Systems of Cities: Harnessing Urbanization for Growth and Poverty Alleviation. Across the five domains of the Urban Strategy, the Series provides a focal point for publications that seek to foster a better understanding of: the core elements of the city system; pro-poor policies; city economies; urban land and housing markets; sustainable urban environment; and other issues germane to the urban development agenda.
Urban infrastructure investment needs in the developing world are immense, particularly when the additional costs associated with lower-carbon, more climate-resilient options are considered. These cannot possibly be financed from fiscal sources and ODA flows alone; private financing will need to be accessed. Focusing on the ability of city governments and subnational urban utilities to mobilise private finance, this paper makes two core arguments. First, private investment in municipal infrastructure requires robust institutional, fiscal and regulatory systems that are often absent in developing countries. Establishing such systems often requires policy and institutional reform, much of which lies beyond the competence and control of city governments themselves. Second, while the marginal investment needs related to climate mitigation and adaptation complicate and aggravate the picture, they do not alter the fundamental requirements of private investors. Put simply, municipalities and utilities will need to satisfy the requirements of regular private finance before they can attract green private finance. This paper looks across the main avenues for city governments to mobilise private finance-municipal borrowing, public-private partnerships, and land value capture instruments-and identifies four broad factors that determine the potential size and scope of city leveraging activity. It then offers a new framework to understand where the most pressing constraints to private investment readiness lie and proposes priority measures that local and national governments, together with development partners and other stakeholders, can take to address them.
As cities plan for post-COVID recovery, many questions preoccupy mayors, policymakers, planners and developers. This article examines COVID-19’s impact on cities, drawing on local governments’ developing policies and responses to identify some of the emerging trends and trade-offs. Overall, city recovery will likely involve some transformation to land uses and real estate markets, with increasing demand for urban amenities and nature, and with policies in support of affordable housing, slum upgrading and informal sector employment, to achieve more liveable and inclusive cities. This in turn will depend on the policies, planning, finance, digital infrastructure and governance systems in place. While many city challenges predate COVID-19, they were exacerbated by the pandemic. The extent to which cities, and especially cities in the global South, will overcome such challenges will depend on political will and the implementation of targeted policies and low-cost investments in sustainability, liveability and inclusion.
In this paper, we provide a novel approach to distinguish livable urban densities from crowded cities and describe how this distinction has proved to be critical in predicting COVID-19 contagion hotspots in cities in low- and middle-income country. Urban population density—considered as the ratio of population to land area, without reference to floor space consumption or other measures of livability—can have large drawbacks. To address this drawback and distinguish between density and crowding, it is important to adjust for measures of floor space as well as open space and neighborhood amenities. We use a dataset on building heights, representative of cities worldwide, to measure densities based on floor area consumption per person as well as apply this measure to develop a COVID-19 hotspot predictive tool to help city leaders prioritize civic and medical resources during the pandemic. We conclude by outlining priority interventions that could enable city leaders and local governments to transform crowded cities into livable places.
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