Check out the episode:

You can find the transcript through this link.

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Are you interested in long term planning for better neighbourhoods?

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Our summary today works with the article titled Planning ahead for better neighborhoods: Long run evidence from Tanzania from 2017, by Guy Michaels, Dzhamilya Nigmatulina, Ferdinand Rauch, Tanner Regan, Neeraj Baruah, and Amanda Dahlstrand-Rudin, published by the Institute of Labor Economics.

This is a great preparation to our next interview with Fin Moorhouse in episode 324 talking about the need for long term planning and this specific research.

Since we are investigating the future of cities, I thought it would be interesting to see long-term effects of earlier urban programs and what we can learn from them. This research proves that proactive urban planning and infrastructure development can have lasting positive effects.

Find the article through this link.

Abstract: What are the long run consequences of planning and providing basic infrastructure in neighborhoods, where people build their own homes? We study “Sites and Services” projects implemented in seven Tanzanian cities during the 1970s and 1980s, half of which provided infrastructure in previously unpopulated areas (de novo neighborhoods), while the other half upgraded squatter settlements. Using satellite images and surveys from the 2010s, we find that de novo neighborhoods developed better housing than adjacent residential areas (control areas) that were also initially unpopulated. Specifically, de novo neighborhood are more orderly and their buildings have larger footprint areas and are more likely to have multiple stories, as well as connections to electricity and water, basic sanitation and access to roads. And though de novo neighborhoods generally attracted better educated residents than control areas, the educational difference is too small to account for the large difference in residential quality that we find. While we have no natural counterfactual for the upgrading areas, descriptive evidence suggests that they are if anything worse than the control areas.

Connecting episodes you might be interested in:

• No.109R – How much sustainability substance is in urban visions?
• No.265R – Regeneration towards suitability

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