Category: Integrated urban development

Reclaiming Play in Cities Report

Posted on by erik

The report, launched at the 10th World Urban Forum, reviews the evidence around learning through play and the impact that city and urban environments have on children’s access to play and ultimately, their overall development.

Play is increasingly being recognised as the engine of optimal child development, future happiness and achievement. Modern play has become a multi-dimensional, multilayered experience, where narratives and characters flow easily between different play-spaces. From virtual, online and augmented life-worlds into the physical domain and back again, play has become a seamless set of interlinked experiences and opportunities for learning and pleasure.

It is therefore imperative that we design and build cities that meet the needs of children: seeking their input during the design process, providing them with access to play and education, and facilitating their social and cultural interactions.

To better understand the complexity of play in cities and support the design of play-based interventions for children optimal development the report offers a first-of-its-kind Urban Play Framework. The Urban Play Framework assesses four Dimensions
critical to ensure a play-friendly environment for optimal childhood development: they focus on children’s needs, time and opportunity to play, the support and facilitation that enable Learning through Play, and the socio-cultural and urban systems that contribute to play in cities.

More inclusive cities in East Africa: working with politics and informality

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Power and informality interact in complex ways in urban shelter provision. This briefing is based on a study of three East African cities: Nairobi, Hawassa and Mogadishu. The three-year research project studied both financial constraints to accessing land or housing and non- financial constraints such as discrimination on the basis of identity. Our findings underline the importance of knowing who has power within the housing and land markets. Power does not just derive from wealth; politicians, traditional leaders, gatekeepers and others exercise influence in these markets. A person’s identity — and income — impacts the extent to which they can navigate these power structures, and the formal and informal systems that govern access to shelter. Governments and international donors need to improve the lives of the urban poor: notably with low-income, regulated rental schemes; slum-upgrading and affordable finance.

Urban mobility

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In many developing cities, connectivity is undermined by limited infrastructure and weak public transport systems. If people and goods are unable to move easily across a city, firms get locked into small-scale unproductive activities, and people cannot access basic goods and services.

Policymakers face difficult trade-offs in improving systems of mobility, both in addressing growing demands for private transport, and in investing in public transport links in a city. Learning from the experiences of cities across the world facing these challenges offers some key lessons for effective infrastructure investment and smart regulation to meet growing demands for transport.

We have the power to move the world

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The leaders of 14 of the world’s most ambitious and successful sustainable transport cities explain why they are taking action, what they are implementing, the approaches they are taking, and their advice for other cities. Their intension is to inspire and support more cities to show the same leadership. The actions showcased range from expansion and electrification of mass transit, to restrictions on polluting vehicles and improved conditions for pedestrians and cyclists. All the cities featured are signatories to the C40 Green and Healthy (Fossil Fuel Free) Streets declaration.

Untreated and Unsafe

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Cities must ensure universal access to safe, reliable, and affordable sanitation so that all urban residents can lead productive, healthy, and thriving lives. New analysis of 15 cities in the global South shows that on average, 62 percent of sewage and fecal sludge is unsafely managed somewhere along the sanitation service chain.

Global monitoring efforts have resulted in an underestimation of the urban sanitation crisis and the risks to public health, the economy, and the environment. New data and analysis at the city and sub-city level is needed to galvanize action.

Sewers are convenient, safe, sanitary, and work well in dense urban environments and in multistory buildings. From the perspective of the household, sewer connections and services are often less expensive than on-site sanitation options.

In the absence of universal access to sewers, cities need to find an optimal combination of off-site and on-site sanitation options. On-site sanitation systems place enormous responsibility on households and private providers, and thus require strong government capacity to regulate and enforce sanitation standards to ensure public health and safety.

Citywide upgrading of informal settlements can improve low-income households’ access to urban sanitation. City governments should work with community organizations, nongovernmental organizations, and federations to improve and extend sanitation to informal settlements and address affordability.

Global Roadmap of Action

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The report draws attention to the trend of isolated technologies – such as electric vehicles, for example – being over-promoted. The obvious idea is to cut greenhouse-gas emissions, but that will only happen if the electric power used is generated by renewable means, which often is not the case. Moreover, the authors warn that it is not healthy to reduce the diversity in the means of transport. While appreciating the progress made in some areas, the SuM4All report insists that the need for a fundamental, systemic transformation is not being met.

The report proposes a list of the most relevant policies for making transport systems sustainable. It offers no blueprint, because each country must take action according to its specific situation. However, SuM4All presents various instruments in four toolboxes:

  • Regulatory and institutional instruments include rules on safety, vehicle use, emissions, transport services, cross-border traffic and data management.
  • The technology toolbox covers the planning, provision and maintenance of transport infrastructure and services. In this context, the coordination of different means of transport is particularly important and deserves attention at every stage. Safety regulations must be observed as well.
  • The economic and financial toolbox includes concerning taxation, subsidies, loans, pricing et cetera. Close coordination of the public sector, which bears responsibility for infrastructure, with profit-driven companies is essential. Private individuals and companies use the system, and the latter provide innovative technologies, products, services and business models.
  • The communication toolbox helps to run awareness raising geared to changing behaviour, identifying transport alternatives and managing knowledge.

Climate just and climate proof urban development

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As a prelude to the new learning process of Connective Cities in Latin America, the dialogue event “Climate just and climate proof urban development” took place in Niterói, Brazil, from 26-28 November 2019. Cooperation partners of the event were the city of Niterói and UCLG Learning.

The 32 participants in the event, mainly local practitioners, came from 17 cities in six countries: Brazil, Germany, Ecuador, Colombia, Argentina and Mexico. All participants work in their cities or projects on the topic of climate resilience/climate adaptation in the context of sustainable urban development. The aim of the event was to exchange experience and knowledge among local practitioners on the subject, to get to know good practices and to give mutual advice to colleagues, as well as to develop project ideas for further processing in subsequent events.

During an excursion, the group first got to know some of the current and completed projects of the Niterói Municipality in situ, and then gained further insights during a meeting with the Mayor Rodrigo Neves.

15 Pathways to localise the Sustainable Development Goals

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This publication illustrates how the 15 pathways of the Basque Declaration can be used by towns and cities to localise the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).

In this publication, the 15 pathways of the Basque Declaration are illustrated with stories taken from the Transformative Action database of the Sustainable Cities Platform. Each of these stories are former applications to the Transformative Action Award 2017-2019 and have been reviewed by a jury of experts, which includes representatives from the European Committee of the Regions, the European Investment Bank, UNESCO Etxea, the City of Aalborg (Denmark) and ICLEI Europe.

The purpose of these stories is to provide local governments and other local stakeholders with inspiration for action, rather than the formulation of yet another action plan. The examples also give insight into how to implement the goals using an integrated approach across sectors and departments. For each story, the most relevant pathway and SDGs are indicated, based on an independent assessment by ICLEI Europe. They show the diversity of approaches across topics, geographical locations and local cultures.

The Power of Cities

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“The World Health Organization (WHO) has identified urbanization as one of the key challenges for public health in the 21st century. It is typically discussed in negative terms, including infectious outbreaks, unhealthy lifestyles and environmental threats. Yet cities offer significant opportunities to improve public health through health-enhancing policies and actions. […] City leaders are key allies in delivering national public health objectives among large parts of the population. City leaders have the means, opportunity and obligation to protect the health and well-being of their people by defining priorities, uniting stakeholders around common goals, and ensuring accountability for outcomes. City leaders’ commitment is important not just for the health of cities, but for global health as a whole. […] Cities are the main implementation sites for national health policies and programmes – without their support, global targets are unlikely to be achieved. This report is a call for city leaders to rise to the challenge and show the world how local action can help solve global health problems.”

Resilient cities, thriving cities: The evolution of urban resilience

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“This report uses the decade-long experience of the Resilient Cities Congress series as a proxy to track the evolution of the global resilience debate over the last ten years, creating a solid base to build the next decade of bold action.
It explores a variety of resilience approaches; for example, how multi-stakeholder planning has contributed to finance and boosted local resilience, or how leveraging nature-based solutions has enabled cities’ adaptation to climate change and improved people’s quality of life. The report also provides successful examples of social cohesion benefitting physical resilience, especially in informal settlements.”