Patrick Lamson-Hall

Patrick Lamson-Hall is an urban planner and a Fellow in the Urban Expansion programme at NYU’s Marron Institute of Urban Management, where he contributed to the Atlas of Urban Expansion. Through Fitted Projects, the planning firm he co-founded in 2020 with the urban designer Nuria Puigcerver, he prepares plans for charter cities and special economic zones, including the urban plan for Ciudad Morazán in Honduras.

He coordinated the Ethiopia Urban Expansion Initiative, a programme run with the Ethiopian government that applied a deliberately simple method in sixteen cities: extend the municipal boundary well ahead of growth, lay out and protect a grid of arterial roads roughly a kilometre apart, and reserve the open space, all before the land is built on. The premise is that a city government in a poor country cannot control how its edges develop, but it can decide where the roads will run, and doing that early costs almost nothing while doing it late is close to impossible.

His research at NYU forecasts urban growth worldwide, including downscaled maps of where two hundred cities are likely to expand by 2050, and he manages the India Urban Expansion Observatory, a thirty-person research facility in Mumbai. Through Fitted Projects he applies the same discipline to charter cities and special economic zones, among them Ciudad Morazán in Honduras and Green Heart Kilifi in Kenya.