Rural to Urban Migration and Urban Expansion Planning

Patrick Lamson-Hall is an urban planner and a Fellow in the Urban Expansion program of the NYU Marron Institute. He has contributed to the development of the Atlas of Urban Expansion: 2016 Edition, a groundbreaking and original study of the dynamics of global urban growth. He manages the India Urban Expansion Observatory, a 30-person research facility located in Mumbai, India. He was the New York-based coordinator of the Ethiopia Urban Expansion Initiative, a project to implement long-term spatial plans in 16 Ethiopian cities and he coordinated the Climate Smart Cities: Grenada program, a collaboration with the Green Climate Fund.

Mr. Lamson-Hall holds a Master’s Degree in Urban Planning from the NYU Wagner School of Public Service. In addition to his work at NYU, he has contributed to the crafting of the sustainable development goals as an expert urban planner, has collaborated with UN-Habitat on the writing of a methodology for the assessment of public open space, and has shaped new strategies for the evaluation of cities using high-resolution satellite imagery. His other research interests include alternative transportation, special economic zones, and the measurement of urban density. 

Nicolás Galarza was the Deputy Minister of the Environment at the Republic of Colombia until August 2022. Prior to that he was a research scholar in the Urban Expansion program of the NYU Marron Institute. Nicolás holds a Masters of Urban Planning from NYU Wagner Graduate School of Public Service. Prior to pursuing his Masters in New York City, Nicolás served as advisor to the Program Director of the National Poverty Alleviation Strategy and to the High Presidential Commissioner for Social Action on Civic Technology and Innovation in his native Colombia.

Angela Hawken, Ph.D., is a Professor of Public Policy and Director of the NYU Marron Institute of Urban Management. She is the founding director of NYU’s BetaGov, which supports innovation-and-testing for social good. Her team of research and practice scholars, along with a growing cadre of NYU graduate students, works closely with state and local agencies, schools, and nonprofits across 32 states and six countries in developing and testing practices, policies, and new technologies. She is dedicated to partnering with “pracademics” on rapid-cycle innovation and experimentation, empowering practitioners and the people they serve with a central role so that research is performed with them. She directs a community-supervision resource center for the US Department of Justice and the NYU Opioid Collaborative, which works with justice agencies in six states on designing, implementing, and testing responses to the opioid crisis. Most recently, her team is helping prosecutors to harness their own data for equitable decisionmaking, through analysis and decision-support tools. And it works with corrections, parole, and social-service agencies to help returning citizens succeed by supporting a graduated reintegration, which entails an early release from prison into stable housing and supportive services in the community. Prior to joining NYU, she was a Professor of Public Policy at Pepperdine University, a Research Economist at UCLA, and an Associate Policy Analyst at the RAND Corporation. For the US Department of State, she trained mid-career civil servants in Georgia on policy analysis, and for UNDP, she developed cross-country measurement instruments on corruption and gender inequality for Human Development Reports. In Afghanistan, she had a central role in developing a corruption-monitoring system, also for UNDP. She has a B.S. and an Honours degree in Economics from the University of the Witwatersrand and a Ph.D. in Policy Analysis from the RAND Graduate School.