Urban Expansion Program Annual Letter 2025

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

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

(2) Providing 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.

To advance the first mission, the program worked on The Atlas of Urban Growth in collaboration with the World Resources Institute (WRI). This project includes maps and metrics for all cities with populations of 100,000 or more in 2020. The universe of cities is now identified, decadal maps from 1980–2020 are drawn, and associated metrics have been calculated. The work is now being finalized in preparation for creating a website to host the data. The program previously 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. This year's work also included the publication of Angel et al.’s Measuring Change in Urban Land Consumption: A Global Analysis which supports the measurement of a key indicator in the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). We also finalized a study, “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 organizations.  The Inter-American Development Bank published Angel et al.’s Accommodating Urban Growth in Latin American and Caribbean Cities to disseminate and promote our policy proposals to a wide audience across the region. We also recorded a lecture by Angel at a 2024 World Bank Urbanization and Poverty conference, “Twelve Guidelines for Action on Urban Expansion.” Angel has advised the government of Uzbekistan on territorial planning, under contract with the World Bank, and delivered the keynote address at a national conference in Tashkent, “Urban Expansion and Densification in Uzbekistan: Diagnosis and Guidelines for Action.” Angel also delivered the keynote address at a seminar in Santiago, Chile, “Reflections on the Prospects of Urban Densification in Chile” and gave a talk, “Accommodating Urban Growth in the Global South: An Urban Planning Perspective” to a World Bank Technical Deep Dive in October 2025. Additionally, Angel co-authored the chapter, “Mobilizing Land for Rapid Expansion of City Peripheries in Sub-Saharan Africa” for a 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, regarding the program’s work with Ethiopian secondary cities in 2013-2016. Our on-the-ground work stalled when our project, funded by USAID, was terminated. That project 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 the city to subdivide their lands before selling them to informal settlers. We have since engaged in seeking new funding to revive this project. Lastly, we are discussing the incorporation of urban expansion planning into the portfolios of numerous World Bank officials involved in urban projects in the Global South.