Treating the city as a distinct unit of analysis inevitably raises questions about how the city is similar to — and different from — the business. The first question is whether there is any fundamental difference at all. A common way to pose this question runs something like this: Given that consumers are free to choose the businesses where they buy their food, but do not get to vote on the decisions that those businesses make, wouldn’t it make sense for us to let businesses run entire cities the same way?

Much of what we do in a university is organized around units of analysis. In biology, the unit is the organism; in architecture, the building; in international relations, the nation-state. Some of the most important academic innovations, therefore, have emerged when scholars identify a new unit of analysis and come together to understand it. The field of chemical engineering was pioneered at MIT in the 1920s when chemists turned their attention to the chemical plant as a unit of analysis.

Former Bogotá Mayor Enrique Peñalosa spoke about Urbanization with Paul on February 12, 2013.

Paul Romer is named FP top 100 Global Thinkers for “dreaming big about how to reinvent cities.” Click here to read the article.

Reformers tend to assume that progress requires higher levels of government that embrace more people and more nations. This assumption should be challenged. Some reforms may be achieved more quickly by moving in the opposite direction, by devolving down from the national level to newly created subnational jurisdictions. Even as the EU commits to more federation, as it seems poised to do with the proposed banking union, we need to ask if devolving down to new reform zones might be an important complement to familiar national and multi-national strategies.