The New Urban Agenda represents a shared vision for a better and more sustainable future – one in which all people have equal rights and access to the benefits and opportunities that cities can offer, and in which the international community reconsiders the urban systems and physical form of our urban spaces to achieve this.
On this day 9 April 2015, in Seoul, the capital of the Republic of Korea, on the occasion of the ICLEI World Congress 2015, ICLEI Members and representatives of local, subnational governments and our partners worldwide, proclaim the ICLEI Seoul Declaration.
Cities function in an efficient, equitable and sustainable manner only when private and public spaces work in a symbiotic relation to enhance each other. Public space generates equality, however in the past decades it has been drastically been reduced. Inadequate, poorly designed, or privatized public spaces generate exclusion and marginalization.
A defining feature of many of the world’s cities is an outward expansion far beyond formal administrative boundaries, largely propelled by the use of the automobile, poor urban and regional planning and land speculation. A large proportion of cities both from developed and developing countries have high consuming suburban expansion patterns which often extend to even further peripheries. Cities need to accommodate new and thriving urban functions such as transportation routes, etc. as they expand.
Geoffrey Payne outlines five fundamental propositions that are key to his understanding of tenure issues and policy options.
These are:
1) That access to affordable land with adequate security of tenure and associated rights is a pre-condition for realising the goal of adequate housing and poverty reduction;
After natural disasters, governments often relocate vulnerable urban communities in the name of humanitarian relief. But urban communities rarely welcome such relocation, since it frequently exacerbates their daily challenges or creates new risks. Indeed, resettlement after a disaster is often another form of eviction. This briefing discusses the situation in Chennai, where state and local authorities have been building resettlement tenements on inland marsh areas using centrally sponsored schemes for affordable housing.
An estimated 60 per cent of the world’s 17 million refugees currently reside in cities, where they often lack access to financial assistance and legal protection.(1) In their absence, displaced populations depend on participation in formal and, more frequently, informal markets for livelihood generation.
This study was requested by the Ministry for Coordination of Environmental Affairs (MICOA), through the National Directorate of Territorial Planning (DINAPOT) in conjunction with the United Nations Human Settlements Programme (UN-HABITAT); for this purpose, the team of the Cruzeiro do Sul – Research Institute for Development counted with the participation of a group of students of the Master degree course in agricultural development at the Faculty of Agronomy and Forestry Engineering (FAEF) of the Eduardo Mondlane University (UEM).
A viabilidade e sustentabilidade dos sistemas modernos de protecção social, em países subdesenvolvidos como Moçambique, são geralmente avaliadas em torno dos mecanismos financeiros, como se a segurança humana da maioria da população dependesse principalmente da robustez, eficácia e eficiência dos sistemas económico-financeiros.
Urbanization deserves urgent attention from policy makers, academics, entrepreneurs, and social reformers of all stripes. Nothing else will create as many opportunities for social and economic progress. The urbanization project began roughly 1,000 years after the transition from the Pleistocene to the milder and more stable Holocene interglacial. In 2010, the urban population in developing countries stood at 2.5 billion. The developing world can accommodate the urban population growth and declining urban density in many ways.
The accumulation of decent housing matters both because of the difference it makes to living standards and because of its centrality to economic development. The consequences for living standards are far-reaching. In addition to directly conferring utility, decent housing improves health and enables children to do homework. It frees up women's time and enables them to participate in the labor market. More subtly, a home and its environs affect identity and self-respect.