In many urban areas around the United States, certain neighborhoods have few, if any, traditional financial services available for local residents. This intriguing report, produced by the Urban Institute Metropolitan Housing and Communities Policy Center (for the Fannie Mae Foundation), explores the alternative financial service providers (such as check-cashing outlets) that some 56 million adults...

This special section from the Brookings Institution focuses its considerable intellectual vigor on the problems and promises of metropolitan areas around the world. Readers may scout by a number of filters, including Concentrated Poverty, Demographics, Economic Development, Exports, and others. Another great place to start is with the Recent Activity section, which may be scouted using the...

Throughout the twentieth century, numerous commentators, pundits, and scholars have proffered numerous strategies for maintaining the vitality and economic growth of urban areas. Some of the more traditional forms of economic development have included the construction of sports facilities, festival marketplaces, and new buildings for established cultural institutions, such as art museums and opera...

Are we in the age of the smart city? Will everyday existence be transformed by big data and its broad scale application to a range of public services and other central issues? This thoughtful set of meditations was released in June 2014 by scholars at the Wilson Center's Urban Sustainability Laboratory. The cities profiled in this report are New York, Ahmedabad, Sao Paulo, and Beijing, and...

The Center for Urban Land Economics Research (CULER) is a facet of the Program in Real Estate and Urban Land Economics at the University of Wisconsin-Madison that fosters research on markets for land improvements and their related capital markets. Highlights on-site include recent CULER working papers in full-text (1997-present), a bibliography of past papers (1991-1996), and a concise list of...

In the urban policy literature, there are many issues which attract the attention of scholars, politicians, and other practitioners. One rather thorny issue that continues to be of great interest is often called the "spatial mismatch. At the risk of oversimplifying this issue, the essence of this concept is that most job growth and creation occurs at some distance from those persons who are in...

Are you curious to learn more about cities? You'd do well to make a beeline for the Places Wire site, which offers a cornucopia of material on urban parks, public policy, architecture, planning, and other topics. In sum total, the site is a "curated feed of news and commentary on architecture, landscape and urbanism." The site has partnered with 20 different organizations to provide new content on...

Beginning in the early 1990s, the urban cores of many American cities experienced a building renaissance, with the construction of new commercial buildings and tourist-themed facilities continuing apace for over a decade. Despite this development, inner city retail development has generally stagnated over the past few years, with the exception of a few cities. In this 32-page report released in...

The issue of concentrated poverty is one that continues to engage the attention of social workers, politicians, and scholars alike. In this intriguing 24-page report from the Brooking Institution's Center on Urban and Metropolitan Policy, Paul A. Jargowsky presents findings that suggest that concentrated poverty declined significantly during the 1990s. Some of his findings include statistics...

From the Community Development Research Center within the New School University, this new working paper is authored by Edward Blakely, one of the foremost urban policy academics and practitioners in the United States. In the 35-page paper, Professor Blakely examines the use of arbitrage theory as "a means of valuing community assets in urban low-income communities." As Professor Blakely points out...