Throughout the developing world, public agencies often act like illegal squatters. Because they lack title and an incentive to sell the land they manage, these agencies keep the land from being put to its most valuable use. Often this idle or underutilized land is in high-value districts of central cities. Meanwhile, these same cities often have trouble mustering the funds to invest adequately in urban infrastructure. The city’s residents would be much better off if the municipality adjusted its balance sheet, divesting some of its land assets and reinvest the proceeds in infrastructure assets.

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.