A Series of Essays on the Urban Future
The Future of Cities
This chapter describes general urbanization trends in the United States and around the world, from 1950 to the present. Cities can be glamorous or exciting, but what matters most is how they facilitate higher incomes and standards of living.
This book is being published as a series, with permission of the American Enterprise Institute. Each week a new chapter will be published, with links to each chapter.
Click or tap a link below to read or download each chapter. (PDFs open in new tab or window)
Introduction: Welcome to the Urban Future – Joel Kotkin
I. The Big Picture for Global Geography
American Aspiration is Metropolitan – Ryan Streeter
The Urban Future: The Great Dispersion – Wendell Cox (new this week)
Wendell Cox is principal of Demographia, a demographics and public policy firm. He was appointed by Mayor Tom Bradley to three terms on the Los Angeles County Transportation Commission, which was a predecessor agency to the Los Angeles County Metropolitan Transportation Authority. Speaker Newt Gingrich appointed him to the Amtrak Reform Council. He is a senior fellow at the Urban Reform Institute and the Frontier Centre for Public Policy and a member of the board of advisers at the Center for Demo-graphics and Policy at Chapman University. He served as a visiting professor of transport at the Conservatoire National des Arts et Métiers in Paris.
