The planet faces enormous sustainability challenges—ecologically, economically, politically and culturally. With these pressures it becomes increasing urgent that cities respond actively and in an evidence-based and principled way.
In the aftermath of Habitat III and the formulation of the New Urban Agenda, there is much to be done. The United Nations has recommended possible principled pathways for cities to consider. There are the 17 universal Sustainable Development Goals recommended by the United Nations General Assembly. This includes Goal 11 relating to sustainable cities and human settlements: ‘Make cities and human settlements inclusive, safe, resilient and sustainable’. This goal has ten targets, including the following:
- By 2030, ensure access for all to adequate, safe and affordable housing and basic services and upgrade slums.
- By 2030, enhance inclusive and sustainable urbanization and capacity for participatory, integrated and sustainable human settlement planning and management in all countries
Quite rightly, the New Urban Agenda and the Sustainable Development Goals leave different municipalities to develop city-level responses, but there are still major issues to resolve:
- Both the NUA and the SDGs have very general and aspirational goals and an uneven mixture of specific, diffuse, challenging and difficult-to-measure targets (hence Objective 2 of the Collaboratory);
- There is no translation process for working between the NUA and the SDGs (hence Objective 4);
- Both processes for deciding upon the goals and the terms of the New Urban Agenda were member-state led, and while cities were asked to respond in a broad consultation process, it remained a largely top-down process (hence Objective 5);
- Both largely left out cultural questions, except in the area of gender and training (hence Objective 6 and the use of the Circles approach);
- Both leave it open about what cities should do. Because cities are complex geopolitical zones, they have to do everything. They in effect need to be able to respond to all the goals and most of the targets. Certainly Goal 11 is the only goal to explicitly focus on cities, but because cities are the dominant loci of the life of people on this planet, it is incumbent on them to respond to most of the terms of sustainable development (hence Objectives 1–7).
All of this means that, for cities, acting upon and reporting on targets is an incredibly complex process. They need to consult and act together, learning from each other’s strengths and weaknesses, positive outcomes and failures.