NESTA POLICY BREAKFAST with Professor Ed Glaeser: Innovation and Cities – Wednesday 27th August, 2008 

220 million Americans crowd together in the 3% of the country that is urban. 35 million people live in the vast metropolis of Tokyo, the most productive urban area in the world. The central city of Mumbai alone has 12 million people, and Shanghai almost as many. We choose to live cheek by jowl, in a planet with vast amounts of space. Yet despite all of the land available to us, we choose to live in proximity to cities.

In recent years, innovation has become an important focus of regional and urban policy in the UK.  But this leaves open some fundamental questions.  Why are some cities so much more productive than others?  What are the environmental and social costs of density?  How does living close to others change us?  Why do cities rise and fall?  The economic approach to understanding location choices, like living in cities, focuses on understanding the motives might underlie those choices.  Are places attracting people by offering high wages or cheap housing or good weather?  Why do firms stay in places where they must pay high wages?

On August 27^th, Harvard professor Ed Glaeser, one of the world’s leading experts on urban economies, will explore what economics can tell us about the answers to these questions.

To find out more and to take part in the conversation, please join us for what we are sure will be a stimulating and thought-provoking debate.  Full breakfast will be provided.

When: Wednesday 27th August, 8.00am – 9.30am

Where: NESTA, 1 Plough Place, London, EC4A 1DE

NESTA’s monthly Policy Breakfasts aim to strengthen the innovation policy community and foster debate and new ideas.

Edward Glaeser is the Fred and Eleanor Glimp Professor of Economics in the Faculty of Arts and Sciences at Harvard University, where he has taught since 1992. He is Director of the Taubman Center for State and Local Government and Director of the Rappaport Institute of Greater Boston. He teaches urban and social economics and microeconomic theory. He has published dozens of papers on cities, economic growth, and law and economics. In particular, his work has focused on the determinants of city growth and the role of cities as centers of idea transmission. He also edits the Quarterly Journal of Economics. He received his Ph.D. from the University of Chicago in 1992.

NESTA’s Policy & Research Unit

The NPRU aims to help transform the UK’s capacity for innovation by:

* Building a relevant and coherent policy and research programme that resonates with national priorities, political realities, media interest and the research frontier

* Integrating policy goals within all NESTA programmes - using research to design programmes, and using the evidence base created by programmes to drive policy development

* Establishing a strong policy and research community around innovation