Urban Expansion Program Annual Letter 2025

During the past year, the Urban Expansion Program at the Institute, under the leadership of Shlomo (Solly) Angel, has continued to work on its three central missions:

(1)   Developing, analyzing, and disseminating global datasets on urban expansion and densification,

(2)   Giving policy advice on these topics to governments and international organizations; and

(3)   Working on the ground with municipalities and local landholders on preparing the urban periphery for settlement.

Progress on the first mission involved work on The Atlas of Urban Growth, a set of maps and metrics for all cities that had 100,000 people or more in 2020, in collaboration with the World Resources Institute (WRI). The universe of cities has been identified. Maps of urban expansion by decade from 1980 to 2020 have been drawn and the metrics associated with them have been calculated. The work is now being finalized in preparation of creating a website to host the data. The Program has earlier collaborated with WRI in creating a set of global intra-urban land use maps showing irregular settlements, informal land subdivisions, and formal land subdivisions. We are now collaborating with WRI and the World Bank to create a training set and a machine learning algorithm for identifying these land uses in all cities in Sub-Saharan Africa on an annual basis.  Work on this mission this year included the publication of Angel et al’s Measuring Change in Urban Land Consumption: A Global Analysis to assist in measuring as key indicator in the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). We also finalized a study to be published as “Four Complementary Processes for Accommodating Urban Population Growth in the European Union, 1980-2020”. 

Progress on the second mission involved policy-oriented work on urban expansion and densification with national governments and international organization.  This year saw the publication of Angel et al’s Accommodating Urban Growth in Latin American and Caribbean Cities by the Inter-American Development Bank, which seeks to disseminate our policy proposals, promoted by the Bank, to a wide audience in the region. We have also recorded a lecture by Angel to a 2024 World Bank Urbanization and Poverty conference on the Marron YouTube channel titled Twelve Guidelines for Action on Urban Expansion. Angel has also advised the Government of Uzbekistan on territorial planning, under contract with the World Bank, and gave the keynote address in a national conference in Tashkent titled “Urban Expansion and Densification in Uzbekistan: Diagnosis and Guidelines for Action”. Angel also gave the keynote address in a seminar in Santiago, Chile, titled “Reflections on the Prospects of Urban Densification in Chile”. In October 2025, Angel gave a talk to a Technical Deep Dive involving personnel from twelve World Bank projects titled “Accommodating Urban Growth in the Global South: An Urban Planning Perspective”. Angel is also a co-author of the chapter titled “Mobilizing land for rapid expansion of city peripheries in Sub-Saharan Africa” in the forthcoming World Bank flagship report on urbanization in Sub-Saharan Africa.

Progress on the third mission was documented in Ethiopia Urban Expansion Initiative (UEI) Evaluation, Final Report, an impact evaluation, funded by Open Philanthropy, of the Program’s work with Ethiopian secondary cities in 2013-2016.  Our on-the-ground work received below when our project, funded by USAID, that focused on a citywide urban expansion plan for Lilongwe, the capital of Malawi, and on empowering local landholders and their traditional chiefs on the periphery of Lilongwe, the capital of Malawi, to subdivide their lands before selling them to informal settlers was cancelled by the Trump administration. We have since engaged in seeking new funding to revive this project. We are also in direct discussion with numerous World Bank officials involved in urban projects in the Global South about incorporating urban expansion planning into their portfolios.