WHAT IS THE NEW URBAN AGENDA?

The New Urban Agenda is the outcome document agreed upon at the Habitat III cities conference in Quit, Ecuador, in October 2016. It will guide the efforts around urbanization of a wide range of actors — nation states, city and regional leaders, international development funders, United Nations programmes and civil society — for the next 20 years. Inevitably, this agenda will also lay the groundwork for policies and approaches that will extend, and impact, far into the 

What does the New Urban Agenda cover?

The New Urban Agenda, coming on the heels of the crystallization of the Post-2015 Development Agenda, seeks to create a mutually reinforcing relationship between urbanization and development. The idea is that these two concepts will become parallel vehicles for sustainable development.

The agenda thus seeks to offer guidelines on a range of “enablers” that can further cement the relationship between urbanization and sustainable development. This includes, on the one hand, “development enablers” that seek to harness the multiple, often chaotic forces of urbanization in ways that can generate across-the-board growth — national urban policy; laws, institutions and systems of governance; and the broad urban economy.

“Operational enablers”, on the other hand, aim to bolster sustainable urban development — or to allow it to take place at all. When implemented, they result in better outcomes for patterns of land use, how a city is formed and how resources are managed. The New Urban Agenda underscores three operational enablers, collectively being referred to by the UN-Habitat leadership as the “three-legged” approach: local fiscal systems, urban planning, and basic services and infrastructure.

What priorities guide the New Urban Agenda?

Beyond the specific technocratic solutions of economics and governance, several core ideas form the ideological underpinnings of the New Urban Agenda. Democratic development and respect for human rights feature prominently, for instance, as does the relationship between the environment and urbanization.

Similarly, the New Urban Agenda includes significant focus on equity in the face of globalization, as well as how to ensure the safety and security of everyone who lives in urban areas, of any gender and age. Risk reduction and urban resilience likewise play prominent roles. And the new agenda places key importance on figuring out how to set up a global monitoring mechanism to track all of these issues and concerns  although the specifics on this remain up in the air pending debate by the U. N. General Assembly in 2017-18.

Meanwhile, the core issues of the Habitat Agenda — adequate housing and sustainable human settlements — remain on the table, as the number of people worldwide living in urban slums continues to grow. Indeed, in the time since the Habitat Agenda was adopted the world has become majority urban, lending extra urgency to the New Urban Agenda.

There is also an increasing recognition that cities have morphed into mega-regions, urban corridors and city-regions whose economic, social and political geographies defy traditional conceptions of the “city”. The New Urban Agenda thus was forced to address these trends in urbanization while also recognizing that cities and metropolitan areas are the major drivers of national economies.

Will the New Urban Agenda be a binding agreement for member states?

No. As an “agenda” it provides guidance to nation states, city and regional authorities, civil society, foundations, NGOs, academic researchers and U. N. agencies in their thinking about cities, urbanization and sustainable development. But guidance is not binding.

This arrangement is different from, for example, the December 2015 climate negotiations in Paris, which aspired to result in a legally binding agreement.