Cities all the way down: a new geographical framework for development

Wednesday, 10 June 2026, 5pm to 6.15pm

Development is usually measured and governed at the level of nations — but the evidence tells a different story, in which cities are the fundamental unit. This inversion redefines development as a tangible process of physical, social and economic connectivity, leading to interesting new solutions.

It is a central dogma of international policy that nations are the principal units of development. However, empirical support for this view is weak, and national-level commitments are faltering — driven by deep internal divisions that expose the limitations of top-down frameworks. Within any nation, development varies enormously across scales: regions, cities, and neighbourhoods each face distinct constraints and priorities and often move at different speeds.

In this talk, Professor Bettencourt will show that cities and urban systems are the natural environments creating development. In this context, normative ideas of development acquire a new and more precise meaning, as the tangible expansion of physical, social, and economic connectivity and interdependence. He will show that this framework explains empirical patterns across time and diverse geographies and accounts for simultaneous changes across many distinct metrics, reconciling heterogeneity at the largest scale (nations) and the smallest (neighbourhoods) within a single coherent picture.

This view contrasts sharply with prevailing approaches to sustainable development. Rather than top-down national targets, which suffer from ecological fallacies and distributional effects, it emphasises the articulation of bottom-up processes across scales including communities of innovation, physical connectivity, and the basic services that support human development.

Speaker(s): Professor Luís Bettencourt (Professor of Ecology and Evolution, University of Chicago)

Venue: Oxford Martin School - Oxford Martin School 34 Broad Street Oxford Oxfordshire OX1 3BD United Kingdom

Department: Oxford Martin School (Unit)

Organiser: Oxford Martin School Events Team

Register here: https://www.oxfordmartin.ox.ac.uk/events/framework-for-development