Making Room for a Planet of Cities

The Making Room Paradigm draws on data collected from a sample of 120 cities, extracted from a much larger database, and is based on the realization that rapid urban population growth and its rapid concomitant urban expansion are inevitable and that cities need to secure the lands for essential public works—an arterial infrastructure grid and a hierarchy of public open spaces—well in advance of their expansion for them to become more efficient, more equitable, and more sustainable.Shlomo (Solly) Angel is a Senior Research Scholar and Adjunct Professor of Urban Planning at the Urbanization Project, located at the Stern School of Business of New York University. He is the leader of the Urban Expansion Initiative there, an action program aimed at preparing cities in rapidly urbanizing countries for their inevitable expansion. The Initiative is now working with four cities in Ethiopia and five cities in Colombia on implementing the Making room Paradigm there. Angel is the author of Planet of Cities [Lincoln Institute of Land Policy, 2012] as well as numerous books and articles on housing and urban development focused on developing countries. He has worked as an advisor to UN-Habitat, the World Bank, and the Inter-American Development Bank, and has taught urban planning at the Asian Institute of Technology in Bangkok, at Princeton, and at New York University.