A new urban agenda?

I. Will Habitat III Get Buy-In From Local Actors?

The text for what is termed “The New Urban Agenda” is being prepared for agreement by national government representatives at Habitat III, the United Nations Conference on Housing and Sustainable Urban Development in Quito in October 2016. The most pressing issue for this Agenda is not so much in what it says. We can predict with some certainty that there will be ringing endorsements for urban centres to be resilient, sustainable, safe and inclusive…Ideally, it will be shorter and more coherent than its predecessor, the Habitat Agenda endorsed at Habitat II in 1996, which ran to over 100 pages.⁽¹⁾

But what will determine the effectiveness of any New Urban Agenda is whether it is relevant to urban governments and urban dwellers, especially those whose needs are not currently met, and gets their buy-in. This means that it has to be clear and relevant to “slum”⁽²⁾/shack dwellers and mayors, as well as to other urban politicians, civil servants and other civil society groups. And what it recommends has be within their capacities. It should also set out a framework to support these local groups to meet goals and targets that have already been established – for instance, within the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and the Paris Agreement.⁽³⁾ Dangerous climate change will not be avoided unless urban governments all around the world act on both adaptation and mitigation.

So is this local relevance possible – when it is national government representatives that are developing the text and that will have to approve it at Habitat III? Will national government delegates endorse an agenda that supports this local relevance with needed strategies, plans and resources? If they do, they will have to go far beyond the SDGs. The Millennium Development Goals and the SDGs are full of goals and targets (i.e. what has to be done), but very weak on how, by whom (in each locality) and with what support.

Then there is the issue of the New Urban Agenda’s length and detail. If it is to clarify the implementation of the SDGs in urban areas, then it has to address almost all the SDG objectives and the many groups or sectors with legitimate claims to having their views represented. The livelihoods and health of almost all the planet’s population are influenced by urbanization and urban areas – including most rural households that depend on urban areas for access to markets, goods and services and often for part of their incomes. Those who fight for the needs of children, youth, people with disabilities, older age groups, and those facing discrimination based on gender, ethnic group, migrant status, and/or simply on the grounds of having low incomes or living in informal settlements, will want their concerns represented. Associations and networks of local governments will come with legitimate demands for inclusion – their members have a huge role in implementing the SDGs and the Paris Agreement. So too will organizations and federations of “slum”/shack dwellers; indeed they are a voice for the billion or so urban dwellers whose needs have not been met, and for whom meeting most SDG targets is particularly urgent. The humanitarian agencies are now acknowledging how much they need to learn to work in urban areas with urban governments (as the paper by Lucy Earle makes clear). The civil society networks and groups working on climate change adaptation and mitigation and on other pressing global environmental issues also have to be considered⁽⁴⁾; these critical concerns were unforeseen by Habitat I and ignored by Habitat II. Public and environmental health issues in urban areas have also received very inadequate attention (as described in the paper by Clare Herrick). And there are many other legitimate claims for attention in any urban agenda, including, for instance, public space, culture, nutrition, links with rural and peri-urban areas, and urban agriculture.

II. The Need for a New Urban Agenda

If we look at all that has not been accomplished over the 40 years since Habitat I, the first UN Conference on Human Settlements, it is clear that we need new urban agendas. Who would have thought that 40 years later, one in seven of the world’s population would still be living in informal settlements? Or that there would still be vast deficits in the supply of safe sufficient water and good-quality sanitation for urban residents,⁽⁵⁾ especially given that all the governments attending Habitat 1 had made commitments to water and sanitation for all?

How new will the urban agenda coming out of Habitat III actually be? UN-Habitat’s “vision document” on the New Urban Agenda and Habitat III contains very little that is new – much of what it says was also said at Habitat I or II.⁽⁶⁾ Perhaps more to the point, will Habitat III be any more effective than Habitat I and II in actually generating the needed action?⁽⁷⁾ There are still many “old” urban agendas that urgently need attention – not only the universal provision for safe sufficient water and good sanitation, but also the upgrading of informal settlements at scale, and land use management in the public interest, as strongly recommended at Habitat I. Any serious attempt to address the urban agenda has to think hard about the delivery failures of recent decades.

III. Learning From New Urban Agendas of the Past

Can we learn from examples of new urban agendas that have managed to be effective in the past 40 years? Various of these agendas have had considerable influence, drawing in large numbers of urban governments. Four of them – the Healthy Cities Movement, Local Agenda 21, Participatory Budgeting and Make My City Resilient – included clear, simple and relevant guidelines for urban governments that got buy-in from thousands of such governments around the world. Their success was due in part to their encouragement of do-able local actions, in part because what they addressed were local issues that were also supported by much of the electorate. It is also important that they focused on urban areas and were addressed to urban governments.

There are some examples of what can be considered genuinely new urban agendas over the last 50 years:

New urban agendas that have worked well in particular cities or nations also have lessons for us. One example is the Community Organizations Development Institute (CODI), a Thai national government agency that worked to channel support and funds to thousands of community-driven upgrading projects. Another is the transformation of the city of Ilo in Peru over 20 years, driven by community-minded mayors.⁽²⁴⁾ Still another is the extraordinary scale of the land occupation and house development undertaken by the Goiania Federation of Tenants and Posseiros in Brazil.⁽²⁵⁾

Finally, since 2010, there is the example of local governments buying in to the Carbonn Climate Registry. This has had commitments from 608 city, town, state and regional governments from 62 countries, representing a total of 553 million people. These are from all over the world – with 92 from Latin America and 65 from Africa. Their commitments cover a decrease in annual greenhouse gas emissions of 1 gigatonne of CO₂ equivalent by 2020. This not only demonstrates how local and other subnational governments can set targets for climate change mitigation, but provides a mechanism that tracks whether and how these commitments are kept – and an incentive for signatories to improve their performance in this area.⁽²⁶⁾

IV. The Basis for a New Urban Agenda

The basis for a new urban agenda is the many SDGs that can be met with sensible urban policies and good local governance. This requires all sectors and agencies to work across sectoral and spatial boundaries.

The papers by Robert M Buckley and Lena Simet and by Michael A Cohen highlight the economic component of a new urban agenda. Well-functioning cities yield enormous returns to nations and to private enterprises – and also to citizens as deficits in infrastructure and service provision are addressed and as prosperity is combined with inclusion. Here, a “new” urban agenda recognizes this, contributes to stronger urban economies, reduces distortions that plague mobility, and helps increase the supply and reduce the cost of land for housing, helped by a rethink of regulations and subsidies. All this is understood as an investment with a high rate of return.

Any contemporary urban agenda has to include a strong climate change agenda. There are so many synergies among good local development, disaster risk reduction and climate change adaptation. All are concerned with reducing local risks to life and health – even as they view the risks and responses through different lenses.⁽²⁷⁾

Meeting SDG commitments to inclusion is the focus of the paper by Gordon McGranahan, Daniel Schensul and Gayatri Singh. This notes the hardening of exclusion in most of the world, very much linked to resistance to urbanization, that can derail key objectives within the SDGs. In many growing urban centres there are powerful politics at play that reject inclusion in favour of elite coalitions, growth first and disregard for the environment. Will the SDGs’ strong commitments to inclusion and greater equality in urban development overcome this? An urban agenda in the SDGs has to deliver on three levels of inclusion: removing discriminatory exclusion (for instance, denying migrants the right to settle in the city, buy property, send children to government schools and have access to services); ensuring that prevailing institutions support the agenda (regulating markets, providing services that reflect the needs of disadvantaged groups); and ensuring that human rights are fully met. The SDGs place much emphasis on universal access to goods and services, and universality is a critical component of inclusion.⁽²⁸⁾

Most citizens would like to achieve the win-win – prosperity with inclusion. For low-income groups, this requires them to be organized and linked together with others who benefit from public goods and services. And it is necessary to seek accountability and transparency from local government. This also requires local governments that recognize how much public investments benefit private enterprises (for instance in the increases in land value from infrastructure provision) and, in a fair society, for private enterprises to pay for the benefits they receive. And this supports local governments to have the capacity to promote and protect the common good – from universal provision of infrastructure and services to pollution control to effective and accountable policing. This now also extends to integrating disaster risk reduction, climate change adaptation and climate change mitigation into ideas of the common good.

Then there is the contentious issue of the indicators that can best be used to monitor and report on progress on the SDGs. A paper by David Simon and 19 co-authors reports on findings from five cities (Bangalore or Bengaluru, Cape Town, Gothenburg, Manchester and Kisumu), looking at whether they have the data required to report on the SDGs. Each city faced problems in providing all the data required, and each proposed various changes to maximize the local relevance of particular targets and indicators.

Almost all papers in this issue mention the limits in the data available to monitor SDG performance, in terms of both what data are collected (or could be collected) and at what level. Much of the data required to monitor SDG progress needs to be available for each small area unit, street or ward to inform local government policies and investments. To address water and sanitation deficits, you need to know exactly where these are. Yet most data sources (for example, national sample surveys) only provide data for national and regional levels or aggregated for all urban areas. Recommendations for SDG indicators may mention the importance of disaggregation by geographic location, but they need to be more specific on what level of disaggregation is needed to support local governments to address the SDGs. David Simon and his co-authors also highlight the fact that the indicators that are chosen and the data sources that are used will influence how the SDGs are actually addressed and monitored. Here again is the issue of the difference between data to aid local decisions and data for comparing cities. There is not much point in having national data on distance to public transit and green spaces; this kind of information is needed for each city and city district. Finally, there is the limitation in data-gathering capacity at national level. Many recommendations call for data on key indicators to be updated every year and available for each locality, but it is not feasible to undertake a census every year. There is also the need to recognize and support cities in collecting relevant data. The papers by Clive Barnett and Susan Parnell and by David Simon and others point to the importance of local governments investing in their own data collection and monitoring process.

In urban areas, so much of “what needs doing” to meet all needs, eliminate poverty, achieve inclusion and leave no one behind (as demanded by the SDGs) depends heavily on the competence, capacity and accountability of urban (metropolitan, city, municipal) government. We know from experience that urban investments and urban governance can help address the pressing social, economic, environmental and ecological issues outlined in the SDGs, both in urban areas and in their links with surrounding rural areas. As such they can have a transformative agenda. To achieve these goals across national territories also requires the support of higher levels of government, which is essential to high returns for both national and local economies, as well as to poverty reduction.

For cities that have innovated in these areas, their government’s responses to democratic pressures have been important. As described earlier, a lot of the innovation has been in Latin America, where it is associated with elected mayors and city governments. Innovations in the “bottom-up” agenda in countries around the world have also been driven by the organizations and federations of slum/shack dwellers, but have at the same time depended on local civil servants and politicians who have been prepared to listen to them and work with them, through what might be termed the co-production of the SDGs. This co-production requires and involves contributions from almost all sectors – and local government taking a key role in making sure these are coherent and coordinated. It also needs cooperation between neighbouring local governments.

V. The Wrong Urban Agendas

Michael A Cohen’s paper questions whether Habitat III will produce a new urban agenda that is relevant and implementable. He notes how little influence Habitat I and II had, and that the issues that these agendas were meant to address have become worse. Current trends, he says, suggest that “in the future cities will become more unequal, larger in population with greater demand for essential services, more spread out in terms of urban form, increasingly difficult and expensive to provision, less productive because of the need for increasing amounts of infrastructure, and at high risk of climate change impacts.”

In so many cities, migrants are still viewed negatively as encroachers, even as the economy of the city and the services enjoyed by the middle class depend on them. Middle-class groups see themselves as the rightful owners of the city and want policies and investments that address their priorities. These have helped spawn plans for the exclusionary “world class cities” and gated cities that Vanessa Watson has documented.⁽²⁹⁾ In these cities, low-income residents are seen as illegal and criminal, encroachers harming the image of the city and its capacity to attract new investment.⁽³⁰⁾

There are also the “sudden, extraordinarily large” publicly funded housing programmes in so many nations, considered in the paper by Robert M Buckley, Achilles Kallergis and Laura Wainer. These ignore all the lessons from the 1970s, which pointed to their ineffectiveness in reaching low-income groups with housing that meets their needs. In many nations, billions of dollars of public money are being spent on housing projects that provide little or no assistance with affordability concerns. Much of the housing is far from existing labour markets, and is rarely coordinated with necessary investments in infrastructure, especially transport. Far from leading to inclusion, it may indeed end up providing subsidized housing for middle- and upper-income groups that can cope better with transport issues.⁽³¹⁾

VI. Moving Forward?

As the paper by Michael A Cohen suggests, we want a New Urban Agenda that is concise and clear; that focuses not only on what must be done but also on how and by whom; that recognizes how much almost all (local and global) goals depend on competent, effective urban governments that work with their citizens and support those living in informal settlements; and that gets their buy-in. We can learn from the power and reach of the Healthy Cities movement, Local Agenda 21, participatory budgeting, Making Cities Resilient and the Carbonn Climate Registry, all of which helped set local agendas without much external support, because they were clear and concise and because local governments could see the value of applying them.

We also need more attention to some of the old agendas – especially the practices of functioning local democracies that respond to and work with their citizens to address the exclusions highlighted in the paper by Gordon McGranahan and others. This paper also reminds us of the ambitious political goals and targets regarding inclusion, empowerment, equality and indivisibility within the SDGs. The relevant practices include addressing political exclusion through innovations like participatory budgeting and co-production of services with slum/shack dweller organizations and federations, and making real the right of all to inhabit the city and have access to its services, public spaces and labour markets. The right to the city is also the right to hold the city government to account, and to kick it out if it does not deliver. The right to the city depends on the exercise of the collective power of urban residents to reshape the process of urbanization through engagement with the state.⁽³²⁾ So much can be done if local citizens and their organizations see local government as a valuable partner that responds to their needs. But for this to bring benefits to low-income groups, they have to be organized.

So much of the innovation in social policies was born in democratic municipal governments. This continues today. Utrecht and some other Dutch cities are trying out a scheme that guarantees a basic income for welfare recipients.⁽³³⁾ Many cities in Europe and some in North America have greatly increased support for bicycle use and increased the percentage of trips made by bicycle – which brings multiple benefits to bicyclists and to the city. Many local governments have enhanced or increase public space. Yet so much of the innovation in places where there are functioning local democracies is never documented because it is seen as the normal functioning of an effective local government.⁽³⁴⁾

What is also noteworthy is that many cities with functioning local democracies have innovated in climate change mitigation even though this brings no immediate benefits to the city. It seems that city governments that deliver on local needs can also get popular support for contributing to addressing pressing global issues.⁽³⁵⁾

One central element of a new urban agenda emphasized by several papers is a shift from funding housing to broader land use management that manages urban expansion and that increases the availability of land for housing with infrastructure at appropriate densities and standards, with locations and transport systems that make these part of the city’s labour market.

One area in much need of innovation is the provision of opportunities for youth. A supplement in The Economist⁽³⁶⁾ noted that globally, youth have never been better educated, but so few opportunities exist for them in labour markets. How can a new urban agenda work for them, providing real opportunities for paid work and for learning at scale so that all the drive and innovation that youth can bring will be channelled into activities that benefit all? There is much to be done to which they can contribute – in upgrading, building materials production, data gathering, city greening, etc.

Another area where innovation is needed is working across sectoral boundaries. So many international funders come with their own agenda, often focused on one particular issue – for instance one particular disease or intervention. There is a reluctance to cross sectoral boundaries; a former head of research at UN-Habitat refused to work on health issues because he claimed that was WHO’s responsibility. Yet attention to environmental and public health is essential to all urban agendas. Will the SDGs address this? Or will each international agency align itself only with the SDGs that it chooses to focus on? And to return to the data issue, will this address the urgent requirement for good data in each locality that identifies local needs?

To end on a personal note: In 1976, I was loaned to the Canadian government by the International Institute for Environment and Development (IIED) to help develop a programme of speakers, workshops and exhibitions for what was called Habitat Forum – the civil society conference (known then as the People’s Conference) in Vancouver that ran alongside the UN Habitat Conference. I spent some of the most enjoyable months of my life there – as the Canadian government gave full support not only to the UN conference but also to Habitat Forum. It supported the conversion of five large seaplane hangars on Jericho Beach into a plenary hall with 4,000 seats and 30 other rooms with capacities ranging from 30 to 500. It had lots of space and equipment for audio-visual materials and indoor and outdoor exhibition space. There was also a festival of films relevant to the conference topic. The crew that converted the hangars installed stunning wood carvings and also what they proudly claimed to be the world’s longest bar. And we only programmed events in advance for half the rooms so that any civil society organization could apply for a room by 17:00. We would draw up the next day’s programme, incorporating these requests, and have a programme available later that evening.

The Canadian government gave generous support not only to the secretariat that managed Habitat Forum but also to covering the travel and accommodation costs of key specialists. One of the first to be invited was John F C Turner. An invitation was extended to Jockin Arputham (who was later to found the National Slum Dwellers Federation), who could not come as residents of the settlement he had been defending (that was also his home) were in the process of being evicted.⁽³⁷⁾ We also organized a series of talks on China in recognition of how important it was becoming in the world. Habitat Forum was visited by many government delegations; at one point this included the president of Mexico (who bought up most of the books from a stall on appropriate technology). Margaret Trudeau, wife of Canadian Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau (and mother of the current prime minister), came to lead a march demanding that the UN conference commit to universal provision for water and sanitation. And Barbara Ward, the founder of IIED and my first boss, was invited to give a speech at the official UN conference. Enrique Penalosa, whose son was later to serve two terms as the mayor of Bogotá, was Secretary General of Habitat I – and he also showed great generosity and support for the civil society conference. It was at Habitat I that Barbara Ward met Jorge E Hardoy and invited him to found a research programme on Human Settlements at IIED. The first research project was an assessment of how much governments were acting on the recommendations they endorsed at Habitat I,⁽³⁸⁾ with support from the Canadian government.

Will there be comparable support for civil society groups and “other stakeholders” in Quito from UN-Habitat and from the host government? Will it be inclusive, allowing diverse civil society groups space to present and discuss? Will there be funding for those who should be there but who cannot afford the cost? Or will civil society participation include just the more powerful and wealthy NGOs?