Round table: Promoting resilient and sustainable cities and human settlements

This round table will take place on the first day of the Regional Forum on Sustainable Development for the UNECE Region (1-2 March 2018). Please register for the Regional Forum to attend.

Round table overview

Achieving long-term sustainability of cities and communities, ensuring they are resilient, connected; institutionally-, spatially- and socially integrated; and compact; requires application of and synergies between different sectors and disciplines. Multiple practical experiences of implementing national urban policies demonstrated that solutions to urban challenges based on sectoral approaches are unlikely to bring impactful results; and that successful implementation of the policies requires in-country and international partnerships and cooperation and financial and institutional arrangements which are built on trust, appropriate representation, sharing of responsibility, authority and resources. 

The focus on sustainability and resilience is a key feature of the 2030 Agenda on Sustainable Development and this is clearly reflected in SDG 11, which aims to make cities and human settlements inclusive, safe, resilient and sustainable. To address a number of major housing and urban challenges, such as: disaster-risk reduction, access to sustainable transport, energy-efficiency measures in the residential buildings, and preventing social exclusion due to unaffordable housing for disadvantaged and vulnerable groups of people, etc.; evidence-based cross-cutting policies must be developed and implemented by governments. It is imperative to develop and implement these policies through horizontal (intersectoral) and vertical (national to local) cooperation. These efforts should reduce risks and increase resilience by using norms, standards and conventions; as well as by using the SDG indicators while addressing rural-urban disparities, including gender disparities, and improving affordability and access to achieve smart sustainable cities.

Objectives & Focus

The roundtable will focus on the following topics:

• Understanding data needs and availability
• Policy responses and specific actions that address information gaps
• Use of policy instruments and tools in implementation of the 2030 Agenda and other global and regional accords
• How to involve all stakeholders/sectors, including those from vulnerable groups, in creating sustainable communities
• Developing and implementing capacity-building programmes for participatory, integrated, sustainable, resilient and affordable human settlement
• Co-optimizing infrastructure with various objectives
• Using data across sectors for informed decision- and policymaking
• Effectiveness of intersectoral planning/coordination/consultation arrangements
• Good practices in regional cooperation

The aims of the roundtable will be:

• to provide a space where policymakers can interact with their peers and other relevant stakeholders in order to exchange experiences, propose solutions to address identified problems and anticipate future developments;
• to identify main lessons and compile a set of key action areas and good practices that can be shared with a wider audience;
• to encourage and promote multi-stakeholder partnerships in sustainable urban development and substantially contribute to promoting the localization of the SDGs as well as the New Urban Agenda and the Sendai Framework for Disaster Risk Reduction transformative commitments and means of implementation.