The world's first cities were in the Uruk cluster in Mesopotamia. The largest was Ur, which appears in the Epic of Gilgamesh (one of the earliest known works of literature, set around 3,500 BCE). Extending over 60 hectares, Ur was home to about 24,000 people. But as an irrigation city, also providing marketing and defense services, it governed and extracted surpluses from a neighboring population of about 500,000. Its urban population was densely concentrated, more than 400 people per hectare, and the planning practices were strikingly sophisticated. With four main residential areas, Ur offered its inhabitants basic amenities such as well-laid-out streets and sanitation. The report provides a framework to help city leaders make informed decisions for sustainable development in their cities. This book, planning, connecting, and financing cities, now distills the lessons learned from these diagnostics into a practical framework for sustainable urbanization, which is organized around the three policy pillars of the title. The coordination among these pillars is critical, particularly the relationship between land use planning and hazard risk, housing, infrastructure, and urban transport. This framework has already helped to reshape core urbanization policy debates and to integrate action across the urban space in countries such as Colombia, India, Uganda, and Vietnam. For example, In India, the Urbanization review provided considerable inputs to the teams that shaped the contours of the 12th five-year plan; in Colombia, the Urbanization review helped in the design of a mission for cities, the product of a high level committee for urban management.
