Inclusive urbanization: Can the 2030 Agenda be delivered without it?

a. Urban exclusion in the era of neoliberalism and globalization

Although urbanization has been strongly associated with poverty reduction, the “stubborn realities” of inequalities in cities have persisted, particularly in the global South.⁽¹³⁾ At the root of many of these inequalities is contestation over urban space. Growing urban populations, and the increasing importance of securing a good urban location, intensify competition and contention over land, including between those concerned with using the land themselves (use value) and those wanting to speculate in land (exchange value).⁽¹⁴⁾ Land contestation is rarely planned, and need not emerge directly from land markets, but can be a key source of inequality.⁽¹⁵⁾

Neoliberal state policies resulting in the state withdrawing from regulating capital have afforded powerful actors the ability to promote their interests via land development.⁽¹⁶⁾ Liminal lands inhabited by people with insecure tenure come to be seen as ripe for private redevelopment, putting these residents, established and newly arrived, in intense competition with private/formal developers. Outcomes of these competing claims over “slum real estate”⁽¹⁷⁾ can lead not only to conflict, but to de-legitimization of citizenship rights of the residents potentially displaced by development, especially when they are recent migrants.

Reforms in many countries have been accompanied by opening of markets to the global economy, and successful cities are increasingly seen as sites for attracting foreign investment (as seen in numerous private sector reports⁽¹⁸⁾). The concept of “world class cities”, which succeed in attracting investment, has been a dominant theme in scholarship highlighting increased socioeconomic exclusion of the urban poor in cities of emerging economies.⁽¹⁹⁾

Cities have become magnets for professional aspirants aiming for high-paying jobs and for the “creative class”.⁽²⁰⁾ Of course cities also attract low-skilled workers looking for opportunities, often within the informal sector. The divergence in the purchasing power of professional and low-skilled jobs invariably leads to the creation of spatial hierarchies as each category claims – or is shunted to – residence in different parts of the city.⁽²¹⁾ The result is a template for urban development that does not include the interests of the urban poor, let alone rural populations aspiring to come to cities.

This divergence follows the dynamics of marginalization linked to identity. There is strong evidence of residential segregation based on caste in India⁽²²⁾ and race in South Africa⁽²³⁾ that align closely with place hierarchies. Intersecting these aspects of marginalization is persistent gender inequality, with women and girls bearing higher burdens of productive and reproductive care work, and in many contexts disproportionately left out of secure work, housing, health, education, and representation and participation in urban governance.⁽²⁴⁾

Exclusion drives these outcomes and also results from them. Bhan argues that “the poor within the discourse of ‘world class cities’ are seen as economically unviable, environmentally harmful and criminal… inseparable from the built environments of the illegal “slums” that they inhabit”.⁽²⁵⁾ Caldeira’s work in São Paulo highlights how low-income rural people entering the urban space are stereotyped as criminals and blamed for the ills of the city.⁽²⁶⁾ Ramanathan shows how the term “encroacher”, applied to newly urbanizing citizens of Indian cities, begins to show up in court orders in the late 1990s.⁽²⁷⁾ There is a tendency for policymakers to see urban population growth as messy, uncontrolled, and detrimental to the health and safety of other residents and the overall quality of life in cities⁽²⁸⁾ – and therefore to the economic growth and investment attraction potential of cities.

At the other end of the classificatory spectrum is the representation of individuals in the new consumerist middle class. They are seen as “rightful owners of the city”, whose rights are legitimated in legal judgements and everyday associational practices of middle-class organizations, especially residential welfare associations, which lobby for promotion of their rights to the urban space. In cities like Nairobi and Luanda, urban development appears heavily driven towards the provision of luxury housing to the middle class within gated communities.⁽²⁹⁾ The stated aim of the Nairobi 2030 Metro Strategy, released in 2008, is to make Nairobi “a world class African metropolis”. As Ballard argues, “middle-class gains do not automatically translate into development for others. Indeed, efforts to centre the middle class threaten to displace, and justify the displacement of, economically marginalized groups seen as surplus to development”.⁽³⁰⁾

City governments use policies and planning tools to constrain access to and organize urban spaces in ways that advantage the urban wealthy and middle classes, and often ignore or are hostile to low-income residents, and rural–urban migrants in particular. “Growth machines”⁽³¹⁾ emerge, in which public–private coalitions, composed of local politicians with private sector interests and other influential actors, come together with a coordinated vision of urban development intended to spur investment and maximize growth. Central to this vision is the prioritization of economic growth at the expense of other objectives, together with a focus on increasing land and property prices. These elite coalitions claim the pathway to inclusive growth, asserting that “intensive development benefits virtually all groups in a locality”.⁽³²⁾

The results, however, often include anti-migration policies, land use and building regulations, and Euclidean or single-use zoning (the separation and distinction of specific land uses from built forms) that have long excluded those who cannot afford to conform.⁽³³⁾ They carry implicit values regarding ideal land uses, appropriate densities and built forms, and preferred travel modes (e.g. automobiles versus walking). They also neglect prevailing economic and social conditions and predictions of rapid population growth. The growth of underserved informal settlements can be an outcome of this neglect, although where planners and policymakers avoid infrastructure investments for fear of attracting more migrants, this might better be described as intentional exclusion.

b. Redefining inclusion

The nature of urban development highlights the limits of an identity-focused definition of social inclusion. As Hickey, Sen and Bukenya point out,⁽³⁴⁾ inclusion can designate radically transformative development, if priority is given to equitable and empowering inclusion. The broader language of inclusion/exclusion provides a strong basis for pursuing human rights and equity, provided this attention to equity and empowerment is maintained. It is also more consistent with contemporary concerns with inequality, and has the advantage of “forcefully emphasizing—and focusing attention on—the role of relational features in deprivation”.⁽³⁵⁾

In this article, we accept the part of the World Bank’s definition⁽³⁶⁾ that describes inclusion as improvements to the terms on which people gain access to the means of securing wellbeing, including most notably markets, services and spaces. However, unlike the World Bank authors, we do not treat inclusion as applying only to identity-based disadvantage.⁽³⁷⁾ We are interested in empowering and equitable inclusion that counters not only overt discrimination, but also structurally created disadvantages. From this perspective, there are three levels of inclusion:

In effect, inclusion extends from eliminating discriminatory exclusion (a), to actively intervening in creating more equitable markets, services and spaces (b), as well as to guaranteeing human rights (c).⁽³⁸⁾ This broader definition illuminates a wide range of barriers that must be addressed to achieve inclusion, along with its truly transformative potential.

a. Gender, services and structural aspects of exclusion

While many of the Millennium Development Goal targets are being met, the targets for sexual and reproductive health (SRH) services, maternal health, and sanitation all lag far behind.⁽⁵⁰⁾ These services are strongly gendered, and the associated mechanisms of exclusion couple gender with structural issues of markets, services and space. Aggregate indicators for both sanitation and SRH show that urban populations are far better off than their rural counterparts, yet this advantage is unevenly distributed within the urban population.

A common feature of urban peripheries is their spatial exclusion from municipal services, especially networked services such as water and sanitation. As a result, the access of the peri-urban poor to sanitation may be more like that of the rural poor than the urban poor,⁽⁵¹⁾ with greater impacts on public health due to population density. Informal settlements also often lack services, not just because of residents’ low incomes, but because utilities may not be encouraged to invest in areas where people are not meant to be living.

For SRH services, in many low- and middle-income countries progress has been concentrated among upper-income populations. In some, the bottom two or three wealth quintiles have seen no progress or even regression.⁽⁵²⁾ Women in deprived urban communities suffer from much worse maternal health outcomes, linked to a lack of quality care options⁽⁵³⁾; the unmet need for contraception is much closer to that of rural residents, and lifetime abortion rates are high.⁽⁵⁴⁾ City governments have less motivation to provide services to people they think should not be in the city, particularly if they believe or can claim that provision will encourage “undesirable” people to move in.

Better access to reproductive health care and sanitation, ostensibly a benefit of moving to urban areas, can be drastically reduced by spatial exclusion. Since women carry a heavier burden of unpaid household activities, the lack of adequate water and sanitation provision affects them disproportionately through major time costs and insufficient access to public services.⁽⁵⁵⁾ Pregnant women face even greater difficulties when having to walk long distances to use communal facilities that are often badly maintained. Many women wait to relieve themselves until dark, increasing the risk of not only urinary tract infections but also of sexual harassment and assault when defecating in isolated public spaces.⁽⁵⁶⁾ A recent study in India using a probability sample of 5,033 migrant women living in makeshift “slum” settlements found a strong relationship between lack of access to hygienic conditions and reproductive tract infections.⁽⁵⁷⁾ Lack of access to adequate sanitation facilities and products has also been linked to higher dropout and absentee rates among adolescent girls, related especially to menstruation.⁽⁵⁸⁾ And a large-scale quantitative study in India found that construction of school toilets increased female enrolment more than male enrolment.⁽⁵⁹⁾

Studies in Bangladesh, Brazil and Kenya suggest that adolescent girls in informal settlements are also at risk for unplanned pregnancies due to poor education, high levels of insecurity, and lower ability to exercise autonomy over sexual relationships.⁽⁶⁰⁾ Studies from Nairobi found higher levels of risky sexual behaviours (early sexual debut, transactional sex, and multiple sexual partnerships) in adolescents in “slums” compared to those in other communities.⁽⁶¹⁾

A health system that is unequally distributed across space is always a major factor in SRH disparities, typically depicted as an urban–rural divide. While health workers are indeed over-concentrated in urban areas, they are dramatically underrepresented in poor urban communities.⁽⁶²⁾ Urban health systems are much more likely to be private than rural systems, even at the primary health care level.⁽⁶³⁾ Coupled with exclusion from health care for non-registered migrants in many countries, the private market in urban areas becomes another means of excluding rural and poor populations.

What is often described as a major rural–urban divide is more accurately understood as a divide between advantaged urban populations and everyone else – urban and rural.⁽⁶⁴⁾ Addressing this elite urban health system – for instance by incentivizing rotations of health workers across deprived urban areas and rural areas – is critical to reversing urban exclusion,⁽⁶⁵⁾ especially as it undermines the wellbeing of women and girls.

a. More inclusive urbanization from below

Achieving inclusive cities can be a means of realizing human rights, including those of aspiring migrants and rural dwellers wanting to access urban markets, services and spaces. The “right to the city” deriving from Henri Lefebvre’s work⁽⁹⁶⁾ provides a specifically urban concept of inclusion. The heart of Lefebvre’s conception is his notion of a city co-produced through the labour, actions and daily exchanges of the urban residents who have a right not only to inhabit the city but also to be the architects of urban transformations.⁽⁹⁷⁾ In effect, the right to the city “depends on the exercise of collective power [of urban residents] to reshape the process of urbanization” through engagement with the state.⁽⁹⁸⁾ When construed in this manner, the right to the city suggests a central role of social movements in negotiating the production and distribution of urban resources, and in the process creating opportunities for participatory models of governance.

In practice, approaches to realizing the rights of excluded urban dwellers vary widely. The human rights-based approaches (HRBAs) most widely promoted by international development organizations are inevitably far less politically radical than that associated with Lefebvre and Harvey. Some better-known networks of urban community-based organizations try to avoid relying on an HRBA, not for conceptual or ideological reasons, but on practical and structural grounds.⁽⁹⁹⁾ Most excluded urban communities would probably like their rights to be met by the state, but a strategy that relies primarily on making demands on the state is often ineffective and can create conflicts most community members would prefer to avoid. While there is widespread agreement in development circles that human rights must be realized, there is less agreement on how this should be pursued.

The approach of Slum/Shack Dwellers International (SDI), a network of federations of urban poor groups working in alliance with support NGOs, provides an example well documented in this journal.⁽¹⁰⁰⁾ Appadurai celebrated the work of the Indian Alliance, a founding member of SDI, for adopting an approach to human rights rooted in “deep democracy”, rather than in the international system of human rights.⁽¹⁰¹⁾ SDI’s federations are mostly rooted in women’s savings groups that are unaligned politically and ethnically. They do not just demand their rights, but offer to cooperate in their realization. Their strategy, in effect, is to co-produce their own inclusion, developing a better relationship with and more influence over local authorities along the way.⁽¹⁰²⁾ Their tactics often involve making demands on the state with demonstrable solutions in hand. Some argue that such approaches fail to sufficiently challenge the underlying politics creating the exclusion.⁽¹⁰³⁾ Others point to their tangible achievements and argue that the SDI-affiliated federations tend to avoid overtly confrontational approaches because they represent the considered views of their members.⁽¹⁰⁴⁾

The rights of aspiring migrants and rural dwellers hoping for better access to urban markets, services and spaces fit somewhat uneasily with the right to the city and narrowly urban-based social movements and organizations. Often the compromises asked of urban organizations of the urban poor involve closing off spaces or livelihood opportunities previously open to the urban homeless or destitute. An urban homeless people’s federation negotiating better housing for pavement dwellers, for example, is likely to be asked to help ensure that the pavements are not re-occupied. A waste pickers’ federation negotiating a role in the city’s formal waste system may be asked to ensure that informal pickers do not continue to operate outside the system. Creating bottom-up organizing through citizen–government partnerships is not just a tool of the excluded, and indeed can be used by the middle class as a tool of exclusion, as Bhan argues was the case with the “citizen–government partnerships” introduced in Delhi in 1998.⁽¹⁰⁵⁾

In short, the tools and principles of human rights can be used by those struggling for more inclusive urbanization, but are unlikely to be the basis for a bottom-up approach, which will depend on local circumstances and politics. Organizations of residents and of informal sector workers have demonstrated that they can play a critical role in negotiating for inclusion and bringing constructive pressure to bear on the state.⁽¹⁰⁶⁾ The importance of accommodating urban population growth efficiently and fairly can pose a special challenge, however, particularly when the tactics of exclusion are also changing.

b. More inclusive urbanization from above

Many wide-ranging debates over urban democracy, citizenship and participation are central to urban inclusion and the role of the state. In this sub-section the focus is more narrowly on the issues that relate to rapid urbanization and urban population growth, and to make a few points often missing from the broader debates. The first relates to decentralization, which can be conducive to inclusion, but only if central governments act to ensure that local authorities are not left competing to exclude low-income migrants – a competition that often spills over to adversely affect other disadvantaged groups. The second relates to informality, and the importance of finding more inclusive ways of accommodating and upgrading informal settlements and enterprises, not treating this as a choice between persistent informality and incorporation within existing formal systems. The third relates directly to how city governments can become more accommodating of their growing low-income populations, through facilitating efficient and equitable urban expansion and densification.

In the 1990s, decentralization was advocated by neoliberals disillusioned with the role of central governments, by neo-communitarians hoping that decentralization would encourage grassroots democracy, and by more narrowly pragmatic supporters of local governments claiming they are in the best position to meet the large number of local public needs.⁽¹⁰⁷⁾ It is still often presented as a means of making government responsive to the governed,⁽¹⁰⁸⁾ and hence more inclusive. However, with upward of 75 countries having attempted to shift state responsibilities to lower tiers of government,⁽¹⁰⁹⁾ the results have been mixed. Bardhan and Mookherjee⁽¹¹⁰⁾ argue that while central authorities are less responsive to the location-specific needs of their citizens, urban authorities have shown themselves to be more prone to elite capture, as might be predicted by the prevalence of growth machines. Alternatively, Devarajan, Khemani and Shah⁽¹¹¹⁾ argue that most decentralization has only been partial, and has not been done in a way that fosters inclusion.

To achieve inclusive urbanization, decentralization would need to be implemented with more attention than is typically given to local state capacity and better relations between the state and the groups vulnerable to exclusion. This would fit with the progressive politics of the developmental state recently set out by Evans and Heller.⁽¹¹²⁾ It would help to encourage participatory innovations, such as the participatory budgeting that grew out of Brazil’s democratic decentralization.⁽¹¹³⁾ However, to rely heavily on decentralization would miss one of the special challenges of rapid urbanization: some of the groups most vulnerable to exclusion are not yet citizens of the city, or are not considered to be. This includes aspiring migrants. The exclusionary politics associated with attempts to resist urbanization are not addressed by decentralization, which may, indeed, amplify fears that more inclusive policies will increase the inflow of unskilled migrants. The national government has an important role to play in achieving inclusive urbanization, since national policies are needed to help local authorities support rather than exclude disadvantaged groups. Decentralization needs to be pursued in ways that help existing urban citizens gain more control over their cities, but not at the expense of excluding others.

Within cities in rapidly urbanizing countries, informal settlements and the informal economy also pose special challenges for achieving greater inclusion. Informality can be an expression or a cause of exclusion, and takes many forms. While it can just reflect a failure to enforce good policies and regulations, it most often involves policies and regulations better suited to more affluent residents and workers and to a better-resourced state. In either case, informality is likely to result in the establishment of (informal) institutions and physical structures that resist the ex post imposition of the formal rules and regulations. Simply pushing for a more vigorous enforcement of existing regulations can make matters worse. On the other hand, authorities have little inclination to develop regulations and policies supportive of the unacceptably poor, particularly when local elites believe “people who couldn’t afford to live in cities shouldn’t live in them”.⁽¹¹⁴⁾ Moreover, while residents will fight hard to resist evictions, they are rarely inclined to protest about regulations that, for example, require lower residential densities than they can afford, or do not allow them to settle in unplanned settlements that they can afford. Yet this is the thicket of “wicked”⁽¹¹⁵⁾ planning problems that both government authorities and those dependent on the informal sector must enter, in order to co-produce better regulations and policies, and create a progressive transition towards formality and eventually acceptability.

One of the most prevalent and damaging sources of exclusion linked to urbanization, and of the awkward informalities described above, is the failure to plan for anticipated population growth, and the growth in the number of low-income residents in particular. Ideally such planning would make it easier for everyone, including unskilled rural migrants, to secure space and basic services for their homes, and markets for their labour or the products of that labour. For the wealthy, the lack of such planning can be an inconvenience, but for more disadvantaged residents it can be disastrous.

In very simple terms, more urban residents can be accommodated by opening up new areas for residential and mixed-use expansion, or increasing residential density in already built-up areas (or at least reducing its decline). In the interests of inclusion it is critical to prepare for expansion in advance, and to consider how many people there are likely to be as well as what their incomes will be. It is also critical to prepare for densification, and to ensure that those working for low pay, often in the informal sector, are not simply going to be displaced prematurely and without adequate compensation as land prices rise.

The report of the 20-year review of the International Conference on Population and Development presents a simplified series of steps towards a more inclusive and developmental urbanization process.⁽¹¹⁶⁾ It begins by accepting the reality and inevitability of urbanization, which is critical for the political will to take an inclusive path. This in turn enables planning for urban population growth, going beyond urban administrative boundaries to a balance among national, regional and local. The third and fourth steps bring together sustainable and inclusive use of space, through participatory planning and implementation, as a means of preventing the sprawl, exclusion, environmental degradation and spatial mismatch that have characterized so much historical urban development. Within each of these steps, major existing approaches point the way forward.

Some of the practicalities of an inclusive approach to the inevitable expansion of urban areas are presented at http://urbanizationproject.org/blog/urban-expansion. The webpage starts by observing that:

The key initial steps outlined in the primer for this Urban Expansion initiative⁽¹¹⁷⁾ are:

The term “inclusion” does not come up, but a key objective is to open up sufficient land to keep land and house prices affordable in formal and informal markets.

A more inclusive approach to densification is presented at: http://urbandensity.org/. In a Karachi study,⁽¹¹⁸⁾ a problem identified was that low-income settlements were planned as though they would remain low-density indefinitely, with no regulatory mechanism for enabling incremental densification. As in many Asian cities, as low-income, low-rise settlements became more central, they became vulnerable to redevelopment, and residents were displaced to the periphery. The formal alternative, medium-rise settlements built by developers, were often unaffordable to existing residents or unsuitable to their livelihoods. The alternative suggested by Hasan and colleagues, in response to meetings and surveys in low-income settlements, was smaller plots with more support for adding floors as households expanded, along with other innovations. Like the expansion-oriented approach, incremental densification would require changes in regulatory systems as well as modest financial support.

While such approaches can be undermined by powerful private interests and compromised public authorities, they should be reasonably resistant to manipulation. These approaches to housing are radically different from that critiqued in the article by Buckley, Kallergis and Wainer in this issue, which also suggests that is important to focus on the inclusiveness of housing policy.⁽¹¹⁹⁾ The challenge is to build sufficient support for their implementation. Ultimately, the political basis for inclusive urbanization is fragile, despite the fact that it could serve both economic growth and social equity. Some of the key policies face difficulties getting support from growth coalitions, but also from those demanding change from below. The goals of the expansion strategy include keeping land prices and the excess profits of developers down. The goals of progressive densification include removing the unfair advantage developers gain from the restrictions placed on incremental plot-based development by residents. Depending on local politics, the fact that both are economically efficient may not be sufficient to make them attractive to the growth coalitions. On the other hand, advance expansion and progressive densification are likely to appear too conservative and modernist for those interested in radical social change. Detractors can also present such approaches as encouraging both unacceptably high population growth rates (since both would greatly increase the scope for low-cost construction by residents themselves) and unacceptably low housing quality (since both would have to be affordable to the unacceptably poor).

Yet some means of increasing the availability of land for low-income housing is necessary if urbanization is to become more inclusive. If done properly, with strong community engagement and a balance of nationally driven incentives and local control, the approaches just described should enable urbanization to serve some combination of economic flourishing, inclusion and environmental sustainability, and to avoid unduly sharp trade-offs. If at all successful, they should ensure that developers can no longer make the same profits from unproductive speculation and rent seeking, and put both low-income renters and prospective owner-occupiers in a stronger position to resist regimes of exclusion.

c. Inclusive urbanization in the 2030 Agenda

Urbanization, mentioned in just a single target of the SDGs, gets far less attention than inclusion and cities within the SDGs. Yet it cuts to the heart of the 2030 Agenda, both in the prospects it generates – for greater resource efficiency, economies of scale in service provision, new opportunities for mobilization, education and livelihoods – and in the contradictions it highlights. This paper suggests that prospects for social inclusion and equality, central tenets of the 2030 Agenda, are powerfully linked to the process and shape of urbanization. But the hardening of exclusion in many cities, linked to the resistance to urbanization, has the potential to derail key objectives within that agenda.

Governments commit in paragraph 2 of the 2030 Agenda’s political declaration to “achieving sustainable development in its three dimensions – economic, social and environmental – in a balanced and integrated manner”.⁽¹²⁰⁾ This is no small task in an incredibly broad, undeniably ambitious agenda, and requires an overall, systemic shift across many spheres of society. The 17 goals and 169 targets of the agenda indeed add up to an agenda that reflects such a balance. Yet they are also complex and far reaching and inevitably will not be implemented anywhere as a complete package. Zooming in to the level of the growing urban policy space shows the powerful politics at play that rejects balance in favour of elite coalitions, maximizing of exchange value, disregard for the environment, and persistent exclusion. At the centre of this politics are fundamental contradictions among the three dimensions of sustainable development, and too often the solution they proffer is that only through growth first can urban areas develop and ultimately deliver for all.

Aspects of the 2030 Agenda could be used to enable such an elite-led, growth-first approach. The means of implementation resides mostly in the Addis Ababa Action Agenda (AAAA), which maintains and strengthens two major aspects of development financing that emerged in Doha and Monterrey: an increased focused on domestic financing for development, “first and foremost generated by economic growth”,⁽¹²¹⁾ and increased links to the private sector as a development partner. These components will only increase the pressure for growth in urban centres, which already encompass over 80 per cent of global economic activity.⁽¹²²⁾ Greater focus in international development on domestic and private sector considerations aligns with the realities of many cities, which rely on growth coalitions dominated by particular private sector interests. Further, in the least developed countries (LDCs), where urban growth rates are projected to be 3.8 per cent annually for 2015–2020,⁽¹²³⁾ target 8.1 sets an incredibly ambitious economic growth objective of a sustained 7 per cent per capita per year. As in many other contexts, the pressure to grow first in LDCs will be significant. It is precisely in these places that urbanization will result in inclusive or exclusive cities now and for the foreseeable future, and where seeking a balance among economic, social and environmental objectives may seem most contradictory.

This perceived contradiction is a political construct, though, not a certainty. There is nothing fundamentally contradictory about a balanced approach to urbanization, although the balance does require a new politics from both below and above, which creates a system of markets, services and space that enables the inclusive, sustainable settlements to which Goal 11 – and indeed the 2030 Agenda as a whole – aspires.

There are goals for that new politics. Goal 10 addresses inequalities, and not just of income: also included are empowerment; political inclusion including on the basis of identity – the still critical centrepiece of the World Bank definition; removal of discriminatory laws; equality of opportunity and outcome; and facilitation of migration and mobility. Goal 16 aims for good governance, including rule of law, reduced corruption, improved institutions and participatory decision making. Indivisibility means pursuing Goal 11 on the basis of Goal 10 and Goal 16, and together they demand an inclusive urbanization process. Otherwise, the aspirations of the overall agenda will be out of reach for many of the one billion projected new urban residents by 2030, the more than 3.9 billion already living in cities and towns, and the billions more rural residents linked to them through family and work.

It is crucial that this new politics include both national and local, top-down and bottom-up approaches, engaging a balance of stakeholders in the production of urban forms that enable instead of preclude integration. The 2030 Agenda has remained globally negotiated by national-level representatives. The final parts of the 2030 Agenda will unfold over 2016, ending with the Habitat III conference that will put forward a new global urban development agenda, intended to generate a local lens on the SDGs. Inclusive urbanization – with a central focus on the prospects and trajectories of growing cities and towns, and their capacity to combat the predominant tendency towards exclusion and to be part of sustainable development for all – must be at the heart of Habitat III, as well as the urban agenda more broadly, to support the achievement of the 2030 Agenda.