Angel & Blei: Commuting & Urban Spatial Structures

Alejandro Blei has been affiliated with the NYU Urban Expansion Program since 2014 when he joined as research coordinator for the Monitoring Global Urban Expansion Initiative, a collaboration between New York University, UN Habitat, and the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy. In that capacity he oversaw data processes and quality control for Phase I: 2016 Atlas of Urban Expansion – Vol. I Areas and Densities, and Phase III: The Land and Housing Survey in a Global Sample of Cities. In these roles he helped develop metrics and created visualizations that have been used in the Atlas and elsewhere to describe urban expansion patterns over the 1990-2014 period. He is also a co-author of the Atlas of Urban Expansion (2012) where he created a historical dataset of spatial and population changes in a global sample of 30 cities for the 1800-2000 period. That dataset is the basis of a widely viewed collection of urban expansion animations on YouTube. At the Marron Institute, Alex has led research for a variety of projects: inclusive metropolitan economies (Rockefeller Foundation), loss of cultivated land to urban expansion (World Resources Institute), and comparisons of Atlas land cover classifications and urban extent boundaries to the Global Human Settlements Layer (NYU-Lincoln Institute). Prior to joining the Marron Institute he was a National Science Foundation IGERT trainee in transportation science at the University of Illinois at Chicago.  Before that, he was a transit planner in Chicago and New York.

Shlomo (Solly) Angel is a Professor of City Planning at the Marron Institute where he leads the NYU Urban Expansion Program. He is an international expert on housing and urban development policy, having written extensively on the subject, advised the United Nations, the World Bank, and the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB), and implemented projects on the ground. He currently focuses on documenting urban expansion and densification in a global sample of cities, as well as on advising rapidly growing cities on how to prepare adequate room for their inevitable expansion while making adequate room for the densification of their existing footprints as well.  

In 1973, Angel started a program in Human Settlements Planning and Development at the Asian Institute of Technology in Bangkok. He taught at the Institute from 1973 to 1983, while researching housing and urban development in the cities of East, South, and Southeast Asia. He co-edited Land for Housing the Poor in 1982. From the mid-80s to mid-90s, he worked as a housing and urban development consultant to UN-Habitat, the Asian Development Bank, and the Government of Thailand. In 2000, he published Housing Policy Matters, a comparative study of housing conditions and policies in more than fifty countries around the world. From 2000 to 2010 he prepared housing sector assessments of 11 Latin America and Caribbean countries for the IDB and the World Bank. Since 2005, he has been documenting global urban expansion, resulting in the publication of The Dynamics of Global Urban Expansion in 2005, the Atlas of Urban Expansion in 2012 and 2016, and Planet of Citiesin 2012.  

Angel earned a bachelor’s degree in architecture and a doctorate in city and regional planning at the University of California, Berkeley.