CHARTER CITIES

It is worth emphasizing, however, that this evidence mainly comes from the United States or Europe. It could be that the developing world is quite different in this respect. Certainly, high-quality urban infrastructure is much more concentrated in a few cities in most of these countries, and a case could be made both for building more “high quality” cities and for making the few existing big cities more livable in order to promote economic growth.

Romer’s own focus for several years (even before his short and rocky tenure as the World Bank’s Chief Economist) was on the cities of the third world. It continues to be a priority of his. He wants these countries to build cities where creative people would want to come together and new ideas would be born out of the cross-pollination. Cities that would be business friendly but also genuinely livable—Shenzhen without the pollution and the traffic. Unusually for a successful academic, he believed and cared enough in his message to set up a nonprofit think tank to help in the creation of what he called “charter cities.” These would be giant protected enclaves (Romer wants hundreds of them around the world, each of them hosting eventually at least a million people) that live by Romerian rules within nations that do not.