RIO DE JANEIRO, Brazil – This city that stunned the world by capturing the 2016 Olympic Games will witness a different kind of show this week: How the world’s metropolises sell the case that they’ve become key to the planet’s 21st century sustainability.
The event is the United Nations’ fifth biennial World Urban Forum, with more than 10,000 attendees expected. National governments are taking more interest: the Obama administration alone is sending a delegation of 51, including State Department officials and Housing Shaun Donovan.
The cities’ big pitch: They are now home to more than half of the world’s population, headed to 70 percent by 2030. Cities consume 70 percent of global energy output and contribute 60 percent of greenhouse gas emissions. But across much of the globe, they’re so swamped by rural in-migration that 1 billion people today – perhaps 2 billion by 2030 – live in urban slums, many without safe shelter, clean water, sanitation or productive work.
Cities are beehives of human activity; they generate the wealth of nations. But the U.N.’s Habitat division repeatedly warns, unless they can be made environmentally sustainable and unless they can provide basic services for their growing billions of inhabitants, prospects for the human race in this century are not bright.
So a new World Urban Campaign, nurtured into existence by U.N.-Habitat senior official Nicholas You and enthusiastically backed by U.N.-Habitat Executive Director Anna Tibaijuka, gets officially launched Friday. City governments and their regional and global alliances are included, but so are multiple new types of partners – media groups, development banks, academics, trade unions and such corporations as Siemens, ARCADIS, CEMEX and Veolia Environment.
The World Urban Campaign doesn’t reject the ongoing need of cities to capture the attention and support of central governments. But its focus is different: to unite a broad range of interested stakeholders to invest in sustainable cities, share knowledge of what works, and set benchmarks to help cities – and the world – monitor urban progress.
A top goal is “accessible and pro-poor” policies in land use, infrastructure, housing and transportation mobility – the key issue of Rio debates this week focusing on the concept of a “right to the city” for all urban dwellers.
Developing the World Urban Campaign has also led to planning for another “first” – a “100 Cities” initiative that appears the opposite of typical U.N. top-down operations. Instead, 100 Cities will employ user-friendly Web 2.0 tools to invite nominations. Anyone in a city – a mayor or corporation, a public transit official, a neighborhood activist – will be able to nominate a promising new initiative or practice. A community-based bank, for example, could apply by showing the ways it is helping the poor defend their homes against flooding.
But the applicant won’t “own” the application. Others in the same city will be invited to join in with complementary ideas. City hall’s support will be solicited. And if the application gets selected in worldwide competition, 100 Cities will designate an independent “champion” to coach the project and submit, twice-a-year, brief reports on its progress, lessons learned, and how it is enlisting added partners.
The idea is to move beyond the “best practices” competitions that U.N.-Habitat itself has sponsored to a new “living practices” mode. Best practices nominations typically look backward at results, featuring expert-prepared documentation. Living practices, by contrast, are designed to look forward by focusing on emerging challenges in a spirit of creative learning and enlisting new allies.
A crew of inventive doctoral students at the University of Pennsylvania’s Institute for Urban Research has actually been helping U.N.-Habitat rethink its entire best practice program, leading to the “living practices” focus.
With the World Urban Campaign and 100 Cities program launched, there’s a real chance that this year’s World Urban Forum will have more practical impacts than its talk-heavy predecessors.
The irony is that the author-enablers will soon be departing from the U.N.-Habitat headquarters in Nairobi. Tibaijuka is not seeking another term as executive director. And Nicholas You will retire July 16 after two decades of Habitat service.
You is the epitome of a skilled – and motivated – global civil servant. Chinese by birth, raised in Europe, living in Africa, he travels the world trying to pull together the strands of coherent urbanism for the times.
“The capstone of Nicholas’ whole career is happening now,” notes his friend and colleague Gordon Feller of the Urban Age Institute.
But You and Tibaijuka’s big push is more than personal legacy. Add together the Urban Forum’s thousands of concerned delegates, a newly-focused U.N.-Habitat, and an “ear-to-the-ground” World Urban Campaign and 100 Cities effort – all focused on working more intensively with individual cities and their civil society. Cumulatively, they could make a crucial difference for this rapidly urbanizing planet.
Neal Peirce’s e-mail address is nrp@citistates.com.
