Preface

Brookings-Wharton Papers on Urban Affairs has for ten years been devoted to publishing forward-looking research on urban policy issues in a form accessible to a diverse audience. This is the tenth and final volume in the series. It contains a symposium on international urban issues and three other papers on the inventiveness of cities, on discrimination in subprime mortgages, and on job decentralization and suburbanization.

It is appropriate at this point to acknowledge the people and institutions that have helped make the ten years of conferences and volumes so rewarding. The many authors and discussants over the past decade deserve special thanks for intellectual contributions to the conferences as well as their efforts to draft arguments in a clear and accessible style for the volumes. We are also grateful to all the other conference participants for making the annual meetings lively and enlightening.

Since its launch in 1999, the collaboration between the Wharton School and the Brookings Institution has drawn on resources and personnel in both academia and the policymaking community. We hoped to create a series of volumes that would be of interest and use to a wide audience, including policymakers and their staffs, practitioners in the private sector, journalists, students, and others.

The conferences at which the papers were initially presented as well as the resulting volumes owe much to the efforts of key people at both Brookings and Wharton. Brookings presidents Michael H. Armacost and Strobe Talbott supported this project. Bruce Katz, director of the Metropolitan Policy Program, has been a loyal and generous supporter of the project, and his research program provided major financial support.

At Wharton, Peter Linneman and Joseph Gyourko, former and current director, respectively, of the Samuel Zell and Robert Lurie Real Estate Center, have supported the project intellectually and financially from its inception. We have also received financial support the past five years from the Urban Research Institute at the University of Pennsylvania, which is codirected by professors Eugenie Birch and Susan Wachter. For two years, the Wharton Dean's Office also provided support for the conference and volume.

Several people at Brookings made vital contributions to the conferences, where drafts of papers were first presented, and to the resulting volumes. Budgetary assistance and oversight have been provided by Jamaine Fletcher (Metropolitan Policy Program) and Linda Gianessi (Economics Studies) of Brookings. Over the decade, Saundra Honeysett, Jeanine Forsythe, Teresa Brown, and Kathleen Kruczlinicki at Brookings organized conference logistics and managed the paper flow. Lael S. Harris ably performed these duties for the current volume. Many Brookings research assistants provided splendid assistance in helping the coeditors fact-check the submissions and prepare summaries of the major articles. This year we thank Sean Hardgrove, Rosanna Smart, and Pavel Svaton for providing this crucial help. Janet Walker and Anthony Nathe of the Brookings Institution Press have managed the production of the conference volumes creatively and efficiently.

The conferences were organized and the volumes edited by Janet Rothenberg Pack of the Business and Public Policy Department at Wharton in collaboration with William G. Gale from 1999 to 2004 and Gary Burtless from 2005 to 2009. Gale, now the director of Economic Studies at Brookings, held the Arjay and Frances Fearing Miller Chair in Economics while he was co-editor of the volumes; Burtless holds the John C. and Nancy D. Whitehead Chair in Economics.

Thank you all!