Why the developing world should look beyond the US experience as a model to manage rapid urbanization

By 2100, eight billion people could live in cities in what is now the developing world. As local and national policy makers grapple with how to manage this rapid population change, many look to the US experience of rural-urban transformation in the 20th century. Juan Pablo Chauvin cautions that differences in key drivers of change such as internal migration trends and human capital mean that urbanization in the developing world is likely to differ significantly from the American example. Overall, he writes, there is still a great deal that we don’t understand about urbanization in the developing world.