n the recently concluded United Nations University's World Institute for Development Econo-mics Research's Jubilee Conference on the future of development economics, some economists rightly pointed out that rapid urbanisation had been taking place in many parts of the developing world. They highlighted that one of the future paths of development economics must be to study this much-neglected aspect of development. Quite symmetrically, the consensus in another recent workshop was that urban areas' overall (GDP) growth cannot be separated from the delivery of public services or strategies to improve them.