On Thursday December 9, 2013, Dr. Joan Clos joined Solly Angel for a Conversations on Urbanization. In his role as Executive Director of UN-Habitat, Dr. Clos is committed to working with governments in the developing world to address the challenges and opportunities presented by rapid urbanization. Among the topics that Angel and Clos addressed was the need to plan for urban expansion decades before it occurs. Rapidly urbanizing cities can act now by taking the relatively straightforward steps of projecting urban growth, planning for the grid of streets in the city's expansion area, and acquiring the rights-of-way for roads as well as land for a hierarchy of public spaces such as parks.

Clos and Angel also discussed the need to monitor global urban expansion, an initiative that UN-Habitat intends to lead with assistance from universities such as NYU. Monitoring the quantity and quality of urbanization can provide municipal and national governments with critical information that can be used to both measure the effectiveness of existing policies and devise new ones.

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