The author explores the issue of urban
over-concentration econometrically, using data from a panel
of 80 to 100 countries every 5 years from 1960 to 1995. He
finds the following: 1) At any level of development there is
indeed a best degree or national urban concentration. It
increases sharply as income rises, up to a per capita income
of about $ 5,000 (Penn World table purchasing parity
income), before declining modestly. The best degree of

Este artículo busca analizar el proceso de expansión urbana de la ciudad de San Carlos de Bariloche, desde un enfoque de la especialidad y la temporalidad, con miras a comprender, desde sus lógicas de crecimiento, el actual contexto de profunda desigualdad urbana. Los distintos actores hegemónicos, los cuales fueron cambiando a lo largo del tiempo, han marcado el pulso de la urbanización, la expansión del ejido municipal y la aprobación de los loteos que contribuyeron a un crecimiento acelerado, descontrolado y especulativo.

The trend toward ever greater urbanization continues unabated across the globe. According to the United Nations, by 2025 closes to 5 billion people will live in urban areas. Many cities, especially in the developing world, are set to explode in size. Over the next decade and a half, Lagos is expected to increase its population 50 percent, to nearly 16 million. Naturally, there is an active debate on whether restricting the growth of megacities is desirable and whether doing so can make residents of those cities and their countries better off.

Urbanization deserves urgent attention from policy makers, academics, entrepreneurs, and social reformers of all stripes. Nothing else will create as many opportunities for social and economic progress. The urbanization project began roughly 1,000 years after the transition from the Pleistocene to the milder and more stable Holocene interglacial. In 2010, the urban population in developing countries stood at 2.5 billion. The developing world can accommodate the urban population growth and declining urban density in many ways.

This paper focuses on three interrelated questions on urbanization and the geography of development. First, although we herald cities with their industrial bases as "engines of growth," does industrialization in fact drive urbanization? While such relationships appear in the data, the process is not straightforward. Among developing countries, changes in income or industrialization correlate only weakly with changes in urbanization. This suggests that policy and institutional factors may also influence the urbanization process.

The great 21st-century migration into cities will present both a great challenge for humanity and a significant opportunity for global economic growth. This paper describes the diverse patterns that define this metropolitan migration. It then lays out a framework for understanding the costs and benefits of new arrivals through migration's externalities and the challenges and policy tradeoffs that confront city stakeholders.

Housing matters to the livability of cities and to the productivity of their economies. The failure of cities to accommodate the housing needs of growing urban populations can be seen in the proliferation of poorly serviced, high-density informal settlements. Such settlements are not new in the history of rapidly growing cities, their persistence results as much from policies as from economics and demographic transition. Slums have attracted most of the attention on urban housing in developing countries, and the Millennium Development Goals have given prominence to their reduction.

Growing like “wildfire”, traffic congestion, the spread of pollution, the inefficiency of the services, the chaotic mix of land uses, lack of green are some of the features, unfortunately now become familiar in cities across the world. This is an interesting time for both examine the tools available to urban planners expression of for the analysis and definition of policies both to see how they have adapted to the new conditions. A betterenvironment and qualitylandscapes are necessary conditions for attractinginvestments, assets and people. But they are not sufficient.

The present paper stems from the evidence that one of the reasons of the “crisis” of today's cities probably depend on mobility issues.   But what should be done to confront all the negative impacts of passenger transportation, without curbing mobility? Can Urban Engineering be applied to promote a friendlier mobility, that should be not only environment and climate friendly, but user friendly as well? And how?

The conceptual horizon of this essay is related, on the one hand, to the adjustment process of the implementation plans of the historic centers of the municipalities of the Sardinian region to the Regional Landscape Plan (RLP), and, on the other hand, to strategic planning as an important tool to guide land transformations in order to implement effective local development processes.  We address these issues through a critical analysis of a set of implementation plans of the historic centers (IPHCs) of Sardinian municipalities adjusted to comply with the rules of the RLP, in the frame work o

This paper analyzes the evolution of land use in the Molise Region. The attention is focused on the changes that occurred primarily on the rural area of the coastal area in this Region.  The presence of urban centers of limited dimension, both for the demographic performance and for the dimensional order, is the main characteristic of this area. The historic part of rural tradition, at the same time, no longer emerges as a primary component of the regional landscape.

The paper presents the case study of the Pilot-Plan of Brasilia, important example of modernist urban design protected as human heritage. Discusses a methodological process to promote visualization of maximum envelops of urban volumes, organized in a set of rules and scripts which structures urban parameters in a logic of volume constructions. Applies City Engine - ESRI facilities to construct and visualize the urban rules. It has the goal to promote characterization, analysis, proposals and simulation of urban parameters in order to support decision making in land use transformation.