The future of our cities: New agenda, new faces, new year and the future
NAIROBI: Urban development is one of our greatest challenges. While the world is highly urbanising, our cities are transforming the nexus for the social, economic, environmental and political realities of our times.
The United Nations Human Settlements ( UN-Habitat) predicts the number of people living in cities will almost double to seven billion in 2050 from 3.7 billion today. Unfortunately, most of our urban centres also are mired with growing unplanned settlements, the so- called slums, which have absolute no basic services while being home to over one billion people.
To tackle this looming urban growth challenge, UN’s New Urban Agenda, a 20-year vision for sustainable cities, was adopted at the 2016 Habitat III conference in Ecuador.
There are also regularly-held World Urban Forum meetings that bring together great minds from the governments, political, development, academia and business to discuss the future of our cities. Next month, Kuala Lumpar will host the ninth series and lay down the implementation strategies under the banner “Cities 2030, Cities for All: Implementing the New Urban Agenda”.
This Forum will contribute to global mobilisation towards advocating for the common vision on sustainable urban development in advancing on the achievement of the Agenda 2030 and the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).
With only 12 years left to reach the SDG agenda, the Forum must come with concrete plans for accelerating a better urban future.
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The late December 2017 appointment of Penang Mayor Datuk Maimunah Mohd Sharif as executive director of UNHabitat is also an important current moment for urban development.
She is tasked with driving the global agenda on the implementation of the new urban agenda, attracting diverse thinking and mobilising different actors to support practical action on the implementation of this agenda. She will further be tasked to provide urban areas and cities with the right mechanism and guidance towards sustainable development path.
My take is that it is doable, but UN-Habitat must mobilise enough financial resources to make it possible.
UN-Habitat must also harmonise the operations of the other UN agencies working within the urban space, including UN Environment Programem ( UNEP), International Labour Organisation ( ILO) and UN Women, among others.
One of the great urban challenges facing UN-Habitat and World Urban Forum attendees is to harmonise the sustainability performances of our cities. It will be necessary for the UNHabitat administration to create a new framework for the City Sustainability Index (CSI) that will enable our city leaders and managers to assess and compare cities’ sustainability performance to understand the global impact of cities on the environment and quality of human life as compared with their economic contribution. — IPS