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.

Excerpt: “Mr Romer’s enthusiasm is undimmed. He says it will take several tries before a project succeeds. But the sort of places that most need charter cities may also be where founding them is trickiest.” Click here to read the full article.

Here at Charter Cities, we’ve received several requests for comment on recent press reports of an agreement with investors to develop the Honduran Special Development Regions (known as REDs, following the Spanish acronym). We learned of these agreements from the media and have no knowledge of their terms, so we’re unable to offer any comment about them. Back in December 2011, the President of Honduras appointed George Akerlof, Nancy Birdsall, Boon-Hwee Ong, Harry Strachan, and me (Paul Romer) to the Transparency Commission established by the RED legislation to oversee the integrity of governance in the REDs.