Before 2019, cities provided both great opportunity for economic transformation, but also great challenges in addresses the downsides of density, including traffic congestion, crime and infrastructure costs. The return of global pandemic has caused enormous disruptions, especially to cities, because urban face-to-face interactions are particularly fraught in an era of disease. The discussion focuses on the impact of disease on urban life, on the challenges of making cities livable, and on the steps that the public sector can take to ensure that urban areas are places of opportunity for all.

Professor Edward Glaeser is the Fred and Eleanor Glimp Professor of Economics and the Chairman of the Department of Economics at Harvard University, where he has taught microeconomic theory, and occasionally urban and public economics, since 1992. He has served as Director of the Taubman Center for State and Local Government, and Director of the Rappaport Institute for Greater Boston. He has published dozens of papers on cities economic growth, 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 received his PhD from the University of Chicago in 1992.

Dr. Kate Vyborny is the Associate Director of the DevLab at Duke and Research Scientist in the Department of Economics at Duke University. She is also a visiting faculty member at LSE and LUMS, and a Fellow of CERP and CDPR. Previously, she has worked on research and policy outreach on foreign aid, trade and development at the Center for Global Development and the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace in Washington, DC. She completed her D.Phil. (PhD) in the Department of Economics at the University of Oxford, where I was affiliated with the Centre for the Study of African Economies.

Dr. Ali Cheema serves as the Director of MHRC and is an Associate Professor of Economics at the MGSHSS, LUMS. He is a Senior Research Fellow at IDEAS Pakistan, co-founder of CERP, and a co-lead academic of the IGC’s Pakistan programme. His areas of research include development, gender, political economy and local governance. His worked has been accepted in in leading journals, such as the Journal of Political Economy, Science, and the American Political Science Review. He holds a PhD in Economics from Cambridge, an MPhil in Economics and Politics from Cambridge, a BA (Hons.) in Philosophy, Politics and Economics (PPE) from Oxford where he was a Rhodes Scholar. He was a visiting Fulbright and SAI Scholar at Harvard Kennedy School in 2010-11.