Private Cities in the Developing World: Has Their Time Come?

Institutional constraints and weak capacity often hamper the ability of local governments in developing countries to steer urbanization. As a result, there are not enough cities to accommodate an unabated rural-urban migration and many of those that exist are messy, sprawling, and disconnected. The flipside is the emergence of entire cities-more than gated communities or industrial parks-led in whole or in part by private actors. To assess the emergence of private cities, the authors examined 14 cases across the developing world in the recent World Bank paper, Private Cities: Outstanding Examples from Developing Countries and Their Implications for Urban Policy. In this event, the authors and discussants will explore the conditions that create these private cities, who these private actors are, and the implications for urban policy.
Expert panelists will include the two authors of the World Bank report, Martin Rama, Consultant, Equitable Growth, Finance and Institutions Vice Presidency, World Bank, and Yue Li, Senior Economist, Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank, in discussion with Rana Hasan, Regional Lead Economist for South Asia, Asian Development Bank, and Robert Helsley, Grosvenor Professor of Cities, Business Economics and Public Policy, Sauder School of Business, University of British Columbia.