Toward Habitat III

Date & Time
Mid-October 2016
Venue
Quito, Ecuador
Description

“Habitat III” is shorthand for a major global summit, formally known as the United Nations Conference on Housing and Sustainable Urban Development, to be held in Quito, Ecuador, in mid-October 2016.

The U. N. has called the conference, the third in a series that began in 1976, to “reinvigorate” the global political commitment to the sustainable development of towns, cities and other urban areas. The product of that reinvigoration, along with pledges and new obligations, is being referred to as the New Urban Agenda.

What’s the opportunity in this event?

The conference will be the first time in 20 years that the international community, led by national governments, has collectively taken stock of fast-changing urban trends and the ways in which these patterns are impacting on human development, environmental well-being, and civic and governance systems worldwide.

In turn, Habitat III will also offer a potent opportunity for the international community at all levels to harmonize its understanding of the problems and opportunities posed by current trends in urbanization. Global actors will also be able to work towards agreement on a broad and collective approach to start to address and even capitalize on these issues.

A significant part of the potential opportunity comes exactly from this breadth of discussion. At the table in making this decision will be the nearly 200 national governments that make up the U. N. General Assembly. Yet they will be buttressed by a broad variety of crucial actors, including cities, the private sector and civil society.

Still, the exact roles of these latter entities remain tenuous. While they will be able to offer formal recommendations, officially they are considered mere observers to the process.

What exactly is sustainable development?

There are many ways to define sustainable development. Indeed, for better and worse that number has only risen as the term itself has moved to the centre of the international development discussion.

One touchstone in defining sustainable development was offered in 1987 by the World Commission on Environment and Development. This was a body mandated by the U. N. General Assembly due to mounting concerns over deteriorating human and natural environments. In the commission’s final report, these experts defined sustainable development as “development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs.”

That definition does suggest a staggeringly broad swath of concerns, touching on national sovereignty and policymaking, international governance around natural resources, private-sector profit motives and consumer trends. It is important to note that sustainability in the development context is not limited to natural resources and environmental concerns but also takes into account economic and social issues of equality, as well.

For its part, the commission’s report placed particular priority on meeting the essential needs of the poor. It also warned that current development priorities weren’t paying adequate attention to the limits of natural resources to supply human communities — and that poor countries were not going to be able to follow the same resource-heavy path to development trod by much of the West.

How does this definition of sustainable development fit into Habitat III?

The World Commission on Environment and Development did much to mainstream a recognition that economic and social development needs to seen in the context of an interconnected system of balances — that progress in one area can, and often does, mean deterioration in another.

There are arguably few contexts in which these tradeoffs can be seen more readily than in today’s urban areas, where notable human progress is fuelled by natural resources extracted from rural areas. This overarching process offers a very robust engine for human betterment. But it is also one that affects different communities very differently, and one that has quickly made large parts of our towns and cities increasingly uninhabitable, with ramifications for the well-being of the entire planet.

Bringing these concerns and opportunities into better — and long-term — balance is a fundamental goal of sustainable development broadly and of the Habitat III conference more particularly.

Who’s putting Habitat III on?

As a formal conference in October 2016, Habitat III and its intended outcomes have been requested by the U. N. General Assembly, the United Nations’ most representative body. It is the nation states of the General Assembly, too, that defined the conference’s parameters, scope and intended results.

Habitat III is thus a U. N.-wide initiative, and that’s a very key distinction. Further, close observers note that even a year and a half before the conference, interest levels throughout the U. N. system and beyond are so high as to suggest that Habitat III could see some of the broadest participation ever for a U. N. summit.

This process is being closely shepherded by the United Nations’ lead agency on urban development, the Human Settlements Program, more commonly referred to as UN-Habitat. The conference’s secretariat is based at UN-Habitat’s headquarters in Nairobi, and the event’s secretary-general is also the agency’s executive director, Joan Clos. Further, one of the key goals of the conference will be to introduce reforms to UN-Habitat’s own mandate to position the agency to oversee the development goals that come out of Habitat III.

In turn, the Habitat III secretariat is receiving formal input from a variety of increasingly active alliances. This includes the World Urban Campaign, a broad global network of urbanists — from civil society, city and business groups — aligned with UN-Habitat and its agenda.

Why is Habitat III being held in Quito?

Quito officially offered to host the Habitat III conference in early 2013, on the initiative of the city’s then-mayor. Quito’s bid ultimately went uncontested, and the U. N. General Assembly decided to accept the offer in December 2014.

Quito has received accolades in the past for being a leader in planning for climate change-related adaptation, while the current government has put housing and quality of life at the centre of its development approach. During the late 1970s, Quito was also singled out to receive formal accolade from the United Nations for the city’s success in preserving its historical core. Along with Krakow, Poland, it was dubbed the inaugural World Heritage City by UNESCO.

Quito’s clear interest in historical preservation could result in strengthened importance being placed on this issue at Habitat III. More broadly, the Ecuadorian government says it sees the New Urban Agenda as an opportunity to bring the views of the Global South together with a new international commitment to sustainable development.

Why does the Habitat III process matter?

Habitat III will not be the first time that the world has gathered to consider and debate a collective approach to current trends impacting on towns, cities and other metropolitan areas. Yet while such summits have taken place twice in the past, this third conference has a weight of responsibility and expectation never before experienced.

Recent years have seen a historic shift in where the world’s communities are living and working. Starting around 2009, more people around the globe began living in urban rather than rural areas. Further, these trends are only picking up speed, with nearly three-quarters of the world’s population expected to live in towns and cities by the middle of this century.

Given the problems of equity, energy consumption and environmental degradation that can already seem intractable in many urban areas, the effects of this shift are confounding for everyone. Cities occupy less than a tenth of the world’s land area yet they suck up three-quarters of all energy use. Metro areas also account for the vast majority of carbon emissions.

Further, historically high levels of inequality are today being felt most prominently in urban areas, where two-thirds of people are thought to experience worse inequity than they did two decades ago.

Habitat III will now offer a major opportunity for the international community to substantive engage with and strategize around these complex issues and many others.

How does Habitat III fit into broader international discussions?

The conference’s timing could function as a powerful energizer to several external processes. These include a pair of the most high-profile international discussions currently taking place, negotiations that together will impact on a historically broad spectrum of humanity. Both are expected to result in global agreements during the course of 2015.

The first is an international climate accord aimed to replace the Kyoto Protocol, negotiations towards which have taken place as the particular impacts of climate change for urban areas and the poor have become increasingly understood. An agreement in December 2015 would set the global agenda around both mitigating and adapting to the effects of climate change for the crucial decades to come.

The second international process that will directly impact on Habitat III is a new set of global development goals meant to focus the international community’s efforts to combat poverty through 2030. Several of these Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) will be directly, and even explicitly, linked with the health of urban areas, while their success will invariably rest on local-level implementation.

Habitat III will be the first major U. N. summit after both the climate and SDGs processes are set to conclude. While this timing is not necessarily by design, the overlap in these three agendas – climate, development and cities – is so powerful as to now offer major complementary energy to each process.

Further, those synergies can be used not only to focus discussion during 2015 but also to clarify and strengthen new climate- and development-related obligations as the Habitat III process moves forward.

What outcomes should we expect from Quito?

The Habitat III conference is tasked with coming up with what’s being referred to as the New Urban Agenda, an urbanization model that sets fresh priorities and strategies that take into account the evolving patterns of the new century.

First and foremost, this will inform and harmonize the work done in agencies across the United Nations system. The new agenda will also impact significantly on the development priorities and programs financed by the broader multilateral system — the World Bank, regional development banks and others — and by governments engaging in their own bilateral funding.

Nation states will also be asked to make a range of unique commitments in alignment with goals and implementation targets associated with the New Urban Agenda. These resulting national urban policies may offer the first comprehensive approach on the issue ever formulated by some countries.

In turn, that new framework and resulting wave of policy and substantive action will create a structure for engagement and accountability that will touch on nearly every aspect of urban development planning. Indeed, it is because of this expansive impact that it is so crucial that stakeholders and informed citizens mobilize around this process while the new agenda is still being formulated.

Who should care about this?

Certainly those involved in urban planning and transport at any level, as well as those “urbanists” who follow the related discussions, will find the debates leading up to Habitat III to be vital.

Yet so too will a broad cross-section of international development practitioners and scholars, including those working in applied technologies, clean energy, health, education, gender, microfinance, governance and more. Those involved in the significant changes currently taking place within foreign aid, including the rise of private sector financing and public-private partnerships, will likewise have much to learn from and contribute to this forum.

For similar reasons, much of the Habitat III agenda, as well as the debates around setting that agenda, will be of key interest to broader civil society. Those that should be gearing up to follow the discussions and make their voices heard include environmentalists, sustainable agriculture proponents, legal advocates, labour and rights watchdogs, housing proponents, immigration workers, even historians and anthropologists, and many others.

Finally, and perhaps most importantly, a key opportunity of the Habitat III process could be a strengthening of the role of local-level governments in the future urban agenda, including through direct engagement at the international level. As such, the evolving discussions leading up to the Quito conference will be of particular interest to mayors, village heads, local development administrators, board commissioners and others.