The United Nations has set 17 goals to change our world. Goal 11 concerns cities explicitly - 'Make cities inclusive, safe, resilient and sustainable - but all 17 goals pertain to cities in some way. Within that process the United Nations has set a series of targets with most relating to cities but in an unexplained way.

In a complementary process, the Berlin-led PrepCity process, an initiative of Metropolis, has been working on a set of basic principles to guide good urban development. This set of principles is based on the proposition that the Principles for Better Cities should begin from a general framework that concerns the human condition, rather than just a list of proposals that are added together from different current or immediate concerns. We start with the idea that there should basic principles that relate to the basic domains of social life: ecology, economics, politics and culture.

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