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World Urban Forum 3 (WUF3)
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The Development Gateway interviewed Mr. Charles Kelly, Commissioner General of the World Urban Forum 3, Our Future: Sustainable Cities – Turning Ideas into Action. Held every two years, the Forum was established by the United Nations to examine one of the most pressing issues facing the world today: rapid urbanization in a world where half of humanity lives in cities and where in the next 50 years that proportion is expected to reach two-thirds of the global population.
 In your opinion, what makes a city sustainable and what are the most pressing issues of the urban environment? And, what is the biggest obstacle preventing environmentally friendly city planning/management? How is the World Urban Forum III playing a role? |
 Not everyone immediately understands what you mean by “sustainable city.” There is a disproportionate focus on the environment side, the physical environment. A great deal of the attention has been on climate change and water issues. It’s been driven primarily from the physical environment.
Thirty-four years ago, when the world community -- through the United Nations -- first looked at the issues of the environment at the Stockholm Conference on the Environment, an artificial distinction between the human and the physical environments was drawn. Back then, very few countries had national environment departments. One of the great successes of the United Nations, from a leadership point of view, has been to establish the United Nations Environment Program (UNEP) and build an international consensus on how to approach environmental issues at a nation-state level and how this cascades down into regional and local levels and brings a focus to the core environmental problems.
But back in 1972, there was a decision that there was too much for the world to deal with at the international level and they separated the human environment from the physical environment, which led to the UN Conference on Human Settlements in Vancouver in 1976. In turn that conference resulted in the creation of UN-HABITAT, first as an agency of UNEP but later as a full agency of the United Nations to address urban issues at an international level.
There’s been 30 years of meetings, conferences and discussions on policy and consensus on how to deal with human settlement issues. I think we recognize now that the physical and the human environments cannot be separated. It all comes together. I think it is important to take a look at many of these environmental questions through the lens of sustainability and that is one of the things we want to achieve in Vancouver: placing the focus on sustainability to address environmental issues in an integrated way. We have to look at environmental issues in a context that includes economic and social issues, including how to engage the local community in finding solutions. So the answer to sustainability is an integrated approach encompassing the economic, the environmental, the social and the participation of the people most affected, in a horizontal fashion. From an operational point of view, sustainability has to be addressed inside of a specific space – like a city or a region. It is place-based.
One of the important takeaways of this focus on urban sustainability is to demonstrate that the linear approaches of the past will not work in the future; that the solutions of the future will require a different decision-making model, an integrated, horizontal model. And that is the overwhelming message. There will be no policy-making at WUF3. WUF3 is focused on the doers -- mayors, urban planners, people who work in cities or local governments, engineers, the private sector, NGOs the community, architects and designers. It’s not about “what we should be doing,” it’s about “how” we should do it. The dialogues and the conversations that will take place in Vancouver, and the new networks that will be developed, will deliver lessons in the administration and operation of cities and a much more sustainable approach to infrastructure and investment in order to cope with this massive shift of growing populations in the urban areas around the world.
Over the next 35-40 years, the world’s population will grow by another couple of billions. One of the biggest challenges will be a massive investment in infrastructure. And how we do this will tell us a lot about the kind of planet we’re going to live on in the future. That is the massive challenge. What we can’t do is build cities, buildings and infrastructure in the way we have done it for the past two or three hundred years. The traditional linear approach and integrated systems that have been part of how cities have made these decisions are not sustainable. We can’t build buildings that cost more to heat than they cost to build.
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| Which specific examples of Best Practices and Lesson Learning opportunities with regard to sustainable urban environmental management would you point to? |
A lot of cities are doing things right. One of the interesting characteristics of cities is their capacity to learn from one another. Cities are essentially large public utilities. Almost all cities in the world manage huge public utilities. The number of services they deliver vary from country to country. But by and large, they run the roads, the water, the sewers, public transit; they set the rules for land planning, urban planning, what the requirements and regulations are for building and a variety of other things. All cities essentially do the same thing and their capacity to learn from each other is enormous.
I think there are a handful of cities in the world that stand out as having done a particularly good job. One that comes to mind is Chicago. Chicago has been linking the environment, the economy and the social side in an integrated approach for the better part of 15 years now. As a result, Chicago is one of the leaders in North America from the point of view of making investments in a way that manages the economic growth, the environment and social inclusion. Chicago stands out.
Vancouver also stands out because the city of Vancouver and the Greater Vancouver Regional District (GVRD) – the 22 cities that make up the GVRD – apply on a day-to-day basis the principles of sustainability as operation management screens for any investment decision. It doesn’t matter if it’s a sewer, a road or a building: that infrastructure investment has to be addressed horizontally, which means that a part of the investment decision is an assessment of the environmental impact, the economic impact, the social impact and, depending on the scale of the investment, a degree of public participation by those most affected. That’s an operating management principle.
The requested resource (/editor/default/) is not availableI think there’s a shift occurring in Los Angeles and in San Francisco as well. I’m more familiar with North American examples. But my understanding is this shift has also been very much a part of the Nordic countries’ urban planning for some time now -- the cities of Finland or Sweden or Norway. I think the difference there and where national governments are playing an interesting role is the extent to which they have been able to combine sustainability principles with a degree of social marketing. The national governments have stood up and played kind of a social marketing role of demonstrating this so that they integrated themselves, the private sector and the operations of schools, hotels and public and private institutions.
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| What would be your message for people working in the field? What would be their role in influencing this agenda? |
One of the things we did through the Habitat Jam, which was quite extraordinary, was we took this principle of public engagement to a new level. Habitat Jam was a massive experiment – to reach out, through the Internet, to anyone and everyone in the world in preparation for WUF3. We had 39,000 people from around the world who participated in this online dialogue about the issues of rapid urbanization.
We have an urgent problem -- the urbanization of poverty and the environmental impacts of this massive urbanization. We have to address this issue from a human, environmental and social perspective. Because this is such an urgent problem and the international community and national governments are having such a great difficulty coping with this problem, the solutions are at the ground or local level. We need to find ways to create an enabling environment to apply the best technologies and provide the opportunities for sharing lessons learned, for building new networks of hope, for encouraging the leaders and decision-makers that are addressing these issues, and providing them with the best tools that exist on the planet to do a better job.
One of the things Canada has tried to do through the Habitat Jam and the hosting of the Forum, is taking the NGO and the civil society communities as seriously as they would national governments. WUF3 will be the first time that a World Urban Forum has been hosted with the full support of a nation state. The previous two forums were essentially UN events funded by the United Nations with relatively small donor contributions. In the case of WUF3 in Vancouver, Canada has stood up and raised the bar and said we must engage governments, the private sector, the civil society, local governments and we must bring new energy to trying to address these problems.
The next World Urban Forum will be in Nanjing in 2008. So this isn’t just one conference that brings a gabfest together and then people go away. What we’re trying to do is to focus on “ideas to action,” recognizing that this is a step in a process. People need to learn from each other not just every two years, but we have to create new networks so people can start solving these problems and addressing these environmental sustainability issues continuously, because they affect lives and cities. And they need to figure out and learn from each other: what’s the best concrete solution to use? What’s the best way to build a building? What’s the best way to try to address some of these issues whether from a legal, regulatory or investment perspective?
These problems are too important for all of us. We have to focus the dialogue on actionable ideas that make a difference in how people invest and how they build cities for the future.
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Daniel A. López, La Cumbrecita, Argentina
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- WB Development Marketplace: Innovations in Water, Sanitation, and Energy Services for Poor People: Washington, DC, May 8-9, 2006
- Global City: Lyon, France, May 17-19, 2006
- World Environment Day 2006: Deserts and Desertification: June 5, 2006
- World Urban Forum: Vancouver, Canada, June 19-23, 2006
- World Urban Festival: Vancouver, Canada, June 21-25
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