Habitat III – 19 October events
Habitat III events with UT involvement (participant or organizer)
Creating safe and inclusive cities that leave no one behind
8.00-9.00, Side event
Room R14, Casa de la Cultura Ecuatoriana “Benjamin Carrion”
Addressing security and inclusion in cities as universal issues, at this side-event we will focus onhow well-managed urbanisation can revitalise urban spaces that had either been lost to violence or suffered from a lack of access to basic services and neglect.Practitioners, community leaders and researchers will come together to ask what terms of inclusion are needed to adhere to the principles of the New Urban Agenda.At the street-levelwe ask: how is security understood by law-enforcement agencies in contemporary cities? And how does this relate to the lived experiences of city dwellers, particularly the poorest and most marginalised?At the citylevelwe turn our gaze to the city wide socio-political and civic actors and institutions that govern urban security provision. And,at the national-levelwe look at how the dynamics of security provision in cities relate to the processes of state building and peace building.Community leaders from Harare and Nairobi will introduce a short film produced by the Institute of Development Studies and Slum Dwellers International (SDI). The film profiles the voices of the most marginalised urban residents narrating what a fruitful, violence-free life in the city means to them.The following discussion will cover what cities in the global north can learn from experiences in the global south, and vice versa. Participants will hear from practitioners with hands-on experience of implementing successful municipal interventions, alongside researchers who have studied and evaluated these interventions over long periods of time. The event will create a space for an evidence-based dialogue on safe and inclusive cities, amongst high-level policy makers and researchers. The event will also aim to mobilise networks of key actors involved in the coconstruction of knowledge around safety and inclusion in cities in order to take the New Urban Agenda forward. Follow the event on Twitter #SafeCities.
Organization
Institute Of Development Studies (IDS)
Partner organizations
ESRC Urban Transformations
City diplomacy: Connecting global cities strategically
9.30-10.30, Side event
Room R13, Casa de la Cultura Ecuatoriana “Benjamin Carrion”
This event explores the capacity of city diplomacy and transnational municipal networks to support effective implementation of Sustainable Development Goal 11 and the New Urban Agenda. It will convene representatives of key city networks, as well as experts in global politics and urban planning, to explore the challenges and possibilities of paradiplomacy, networking, and other collaborations, to launch a global commission on city diplomacy, and to develop a rating and training resource for urban collaborations. By gathering representatives of the major global and regional city networks, as well as representatives of international active global cities, the event will launch development of an action plan to encourage network-to-network collaboration on global challenges, develop a roadmap to an index of city diplomacy efforts, and roll out a training program in negotiation and diplomacy for cities (between December 2016 and July 2017) in order to further enhance the capacity of city diplomacy linked with major other processes such as the Sendai Framework and the Addis Ababa Agenda. The side event will be followed by additional international meetings of the commission, specifically at COP22 in Morocco, the C40 bi-annual summit in Mexico City, a two-day commission UCL retreat at the University of Oxford, the WHO Healthy Cities summit in Rotterdam, and the Chicago Forum on Global Cities.
Organization
The Chicago Council On Global Affairs
Partner organizations
City Leadership Initiative At University College London and the Center For Urban Engagement At Wheaton College
Harnessing the role of technology and innovation in the New Urban Agenda
12.30-13.30, Side event
Room R7, Casa de la Cultura Ecuatoriana “Benjamin Carrion”
The world is urbanising fast and there’s a huge opportunity to use new and innovative technologies to solve the social, environmental and economic challenges that cities are facing. While it is not the only solution, technology has the potential to radically improve the lives of people in cities worldwide. It can also empower a new generation of informed citizens to innovate at community scale and better engage with their governments and neighbourhoods. Habitat III offers a chance to bridge the gap between urbanists, sociologists, technologists and city innovators and it is a unique opportunity to better understand the role that innovation has to play in the New Urban Agenda. Future Cities Catapult is hosting a debate bringing together city leaders, civil society and the private sector. We want to hear how cities are supporting innovation new technologies and integrated city systems to address urban challenges. But we also want to provoke discussion around the changing relationship between citizens and local governments, as well as the transformative ways in which cities are engaging with citizens to design products and services. How can technology can be applied to meet the targets under the SDG11? What opportunities and challenges cities and governments are seeing on its implementation? Why is it important to be able to adapt smart city strategies to each city? How do we enable citizens to take part in a collaborative city making process? The debate will be followed by networking drinks, giving the opportunity to further engage with both speakers and participants.
Organization
Future Cities Catapult
Safer cities
13.00-15.00, Special session
National Library, Casa de la Cultura
Organization
United Nations Human Settlements Programme (UN- Habitat)
Partner organizations
UN Office For Disarmament Affairs (UNODA); UN Women; United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF); United Nations Interregional Crime And Justice Research Institute (UNICRI); United Nations Office On Drugs And Crime (UNODC); United Nations University (UNU); World Bank; World Health Organization (WHO)
Building information modelling as a tool for capacity building for sustainable housing upgrading in informal settlements
14.00-16.00, Networking Event
Room R9, Casa de la Cultura Ecuatoriana, “Benjamín Carrión”
The success of low income housing projects in the global South, including settlement upgrading, requires the participation of all stakeholders including residents. Howe ve r, traditional participatory methods are limited in involving the wider community, tend to be dominated by specific community interest groups and therefore often fail to enable genuine coproduction and bottom up decisions making. Major technical constraints here relate to tools for wider collaborative practices and information sharing. E merging BIM and related mobile devices can overcome such constraints by facilitating deeper participation of residents and other community stakeholders (e.g., CBOs, NGOs) in housing and community upgrading. The technologies can greatly enhance residents’ capacities to easily participate in the design and execution of upgrading and housing projects. BIM systems can be linked to mobile devices through freely available mobile apps and cloud-based systems that now have increasing penetration among all income groups including informal communities. Accordingly residents’ requirements can be captured through their direct input into the project BIM system and merged with existing housing data to gain in-depth understanding of design optimisations and their implications for housing and occupants. This will also enable virtual assessment of design options by residents and other stakeholders that allows their informed participation in the decision making process. The proposed event, therefore, aims to introduce and critically appraise a new approach to building local community capacities through the use of BIM and mobile technologies in the design and delivery of sustainable housing and settlement upgrading. This will include demonstrating how BIM can be used to collect, analyse and model housing performance data; managing development and upgrading projects’ information; and how residents and other stakeholders can participate constructively in the lifecycle of the sustainable housing and upgrading delivery using emerging mobile/cloud BIM.
Organization
Oxford Institute For Sustainable Development – Oxford Brookes University
Partner organizations
Oxford Brookes University
Complementary approaches to unlocking urbanization as a powerful economic development tool
16.30-18.30, Networking Event
Room R6, Casa de la Cultura Ecuatoriana, “Benjamín Carrión”
A knowledge sharing and ‘action learning’ event which brings together participants with notably different perspectives on urban economic and spatial development in the Global South. In particular the networking event will look at how different approaches can contribute to inclusive and sustainable economic prosperity. The concept is to solve a practical challenge for African urban leaders by integrating ‘top-down’ [macro-economic/ spatial planning] and ‘bottom-up’ [participatory, community led, locally financed] approaches to urban economic and spatial development.
Organization
UK Department for International Development
Shaping informed cities
17.00-17.45, Urban Future
Urban Futures Room
Urban observatories can play critical roles in decision-making, providing research and analysis relevant to the successful implementation of New Urban Agenda. The event seeks to showcase, explore and promote discussion around the functions of existing institutions involved in the generation and analysis of data to support urban decision-making. These institutions can inform specific policy decisions, implementation and monitoring, and promote inclusive approaches to governance. The event is designed to strengthen the existing network of shared interest in evidence-based governance, and deepen effective practices within this space. This focus of the session will be illustrated by a case study that profiles the work of the Gauteng City-Region Observatory (GCRO), a research agency that exists as a collaboration between two local universities and the Gauteng city-region government, South Africa. The GCRO is unusual in the context of urban observatories in its engagement with multiple governance levels, taking place across a heterogeneous city-region rather than a single, constrained urban core. GCRO is tasked with helping to build a knowledge base that ‘government, business, labour, civil society and residents all need’ (GCRO website, ‘About’) to improve the economic, social and environmental sustainability of the city region. The case study will include of one of GCRO’s recent work programmes on Green Assets and Infrastructure, which provides some detailed insight in to methods used, and the challenges and dilemmas that must be negotiated in this operating space. The presentation will illustrate the challenges of achieving evidence-based adaptive governance in a developing country urban context, including the constitution of hybrid research agencies, methodological approaches to knowledge co- production and the absorptive capacities of city executive systems. The topical content of the session links to Habitat III (H3) issue papers on Urban Governance and Urban Ecosystems and Resource Management. From the Governance perspective (‘enhanced governing capacities also rely on improved data gathering’), it seeks to understand how knowledge generation and analysis can be optimised in urban settings, especially to enable responsive and adaptive governance approaches in fluid and unpredictable contexts. This includes ways in which multi-stakeholder civil society contributions can be made to city governance. Among other things, the GCRO study will reflect on the role of tolerance and capacity to navigate uncertainty required of practitioners (in both the research and government domains) operating in this space.
Organization
UCL City Leadership Lab
Partner organizations
Gauteng City-Region Observatory (GCRO)
The Quito papers
19:00-20:30, Urban talk
Teatro Nacional
Nearly a century ago, the world’s leading architects wrote a ‘Charter of Athens’ proposing how cities could develop, a document which guided planning throughout the 20th Century. Today, we need a new ‘Charter’ to address very different kinds of cities.
In this session, three urbanists explore guidelines for the future: Richard Sennett (NYU) will present the concept of the Open City, Saskia Sassen (Columbia) will ask who owns the city now and who should own it, Richard Burdett (LSE) will address how cities should grow. This session will be chaired by Dr. Joan Clos (Executive Director, UN-Habitat).