George Osborne's budget yesterday rightly focussed on some of the issues vital to improving the economic performance of our cities, including increased access to housing, new infrastructure investment, and empowering our urban areas to take greater direct control of their economies themselves. But many of the policies announced will be implemented from 2015, meaning that this is a budget which more about growth tomorrow than growth today

High house prices are bad for future economic growth of cities such as Oxford because they price people out of the job opportunities that are available within them. This is bad for the individual, bad for businesses in such cities and, as a result, is bad for the economy.

That race is one from recession to recovery. It will be an urban recovery so it will be the best-equipped cities that are going to lead it. Liverpool has its Mayor in Joe Andersen and that fact alone makes him one of Labour's most powerful leaders and helps to differentiate the city.

"Cities are magnets. Cities are also social time-bombs." A panel of ten leading built environment experts met, on Monday June 18, to discuss the vital issues for our world's burgeoning cities.

It's good to see cities at the heart of the Budget, but questions remain about whether the policies announced today - many of them with impacts that will be felt only in the medium to longer term - will make a substantial difference to economic growth and job creation.

Forecasts about the state of the UK economy make for gloomy reading; it's clear that 2012 will be a difficult year. But does this vary at a local level?

On Thursday, the Deputy Prime Minister Nick Clegg and Minister for Cities Greg Clark launched the Cabinet Office paper 'Unlocking growth in cities'. T...

England's major cities are being given new powers to help boost growth but will have to "shoulder some risks" in return, Nick Clegg will say. The D...