Join UMass LARP for "Greenfield Urban Planning in Africa," a Zube Lecture presented by Vernon Henderson, Professor of Economic Geography at the London School of Economics. The talk will be held on Thursday, October 1st, at 4:00 p.m. in the John W. Olver Design Building Lecture Hall (room 170). Admission is free and open to the public. Snacks and drinks will be provided. A recording of this lecture will be posted to UMass LARP's YouTube channel after the event. About the Talk Urban planning shapes developed country cities, demarcating property rights and coordinating and regulating land use. In developing country cities, characterized by rapid growth, urban informality dominates the landscape of major cities. Planning is typically ineffective. In this context, greenfield urban planning, if done well, creates value. We study Tanzania's flagship “20,000 Plots'' project in Dar es Salaam, which partitioned peri-urban land into over 36,000 formal residential plots. Using administrative records, satellite imagery, and primary surveys, we examine the effects of planning decisions on consumer welfare. We investigate how planning could have been improved to service more lower income people, in a context where biases from the colonial era seem to persist with planners slanting land use towards very large plots. We ask: What attracts people to planned communities? What would improve the speed of uptake and building on plots? Why can there be slow implementation of planned non-residential land uses? About the Speaker John Vernon Henderson is a Canadian-American economist and an academic. He is a Research Affiliate at the International Growth Centre, Director of the Urbanisation in Developing Countries Program, and a Professor of Economic Geography at the London School of Economics. Henderson is most known for his works on models of systems of cities and on urbanization in developing countries, focusing on factor market distortions, urban systems in sub-Saharan Africa, and the spatial layout of cities. Henderson is a research fellow at the Centre for Economic Policy Research and a Fellow of the British Academy.