William Bratton Bratton Group LLC Paul Romer NYU Stern Urbanization Project Cantor Boardroom, 11th Floor Kaufman Management Center 44 West Fourth Street New York, NY 10012 Wednesday, Oct 2nd, 2013 4:30-6PM Join the NYU Stern Urbanization Project for a Conversation on Urbanization with professor Paul Romer and Bill Bratton — CEO of the Bratton Group LLC, Vice Chairman of the Homeland Security Advisory Council, former Chief of the Los Angeles Police Department, and former Police Commissioner in the cities of New York and Boston.

Led by Paul Romer, the Charter Cities initiative focuses on the potential for startup cities to fast track reform. By building new cities in special zones, countries can leverage the ongoing wave of urbanization, generating new options for reform-minded leaders and new choices for families in search of better places to live and work.

The NYU Stern Urbanization Project harnesses the growth of cities to speed up global progress. The world’s cities will add more people in the 21st century than during all of human history to date. Never before have cities and the policy choices therein been more important. Watch the video below and visit urbanizationproject.org to learn more.

One of the newsletters I follow on China is Dragonomics, from GK Research. The head of research there, Arthur Kroeber, has a good command of economic theory but still shows his roots in journalism. His shop seems to stay close to the facts as best they can establish them, with little concern about a theoretical framework into which they must fit and little concern for whatever the fashion of the day happens to be: “China is unstoppable.

The population of the city of Detroit has fallen from 1.8 million in 1950 to about 714,000 in 2010. Could it be possible that after this decrease, Detroit is still more dense than Denver? Using US Census data from 2010, it appears that it is: My colleague Alain Bertaud says that any time someone reports a density for a city, they should show the map. This comparison nicely illustrates his point about why the maps are so informative.