Public Lecture: Cities and urbanisation (Professor Ed Glaeser)

Edward Glaeser, the Fred and Eleanor Glimp Professor of Economics at Harvard, delivered the first IGC public lecture of 2014 on the economics of cities. The lecture was held on Monday 20 January from 6.30-8.00pm in the New Theatre, 1st Floor, East Building.

Ed Glaeser also serves as director of the Taubman Center for State and Local Government and the Rappaport Institute for Greater Boston. He studies the economics of cities, and has written scores of urban issues, including the growth of cities, segregation, crime, and housing markets. He has been particularly interested in the role that geographic proximity can play in creating knowledge and innovation. He received his Ph.D. from the University of Chicago in 1992 and has been at Harvard since then.
Cities and Globation

In 2012 he wrote a book entitled The Triumph of the City which immediately went to the top of best seller lists. Understanding the modern city and the powerful forces within it is the life’s work of Harvard urban economist Edward Glaeser, who at forty is hailed as one of the world’s most exciting urban thinkers. Travelling from city to city, speaking to planners and politicians across the world, he uncovers questions large and small whose answers are both counterintuitive and deeply significant. Should New Orleans be rebuilt? Why can’t my nephew afford an apartment in New York? Is London the new financial capital of the world? Is my job headed to Bangalore? In Triumph of the City, Glaeser takes us around the world and into the mind of the modern city – from Mumbai to Paris to Rio to Detroit to Shanghai, and to any number of points in between – to reveal how cities think, why they behave in the manners that they do, and what wisdom they share with the people who inhabit them.

A summary is available below. Audio and video are also available on the LSE website.