The World Urban Forum encompasses many thematic itineraries around national urban planning for the following topics:

Climate Change, Humanitarian, Local Economic Development, Housing, Land, Migration, Mobility, National Urban Policy, Risk Reduction and Resilience, Municipal Finance, Public Space, Slum Upgrading, Urban Basic Services, Urban Legislation, Women, Urban Design, Urban Safety, Youth and many more sub-categories. As we know, the United Nations General Assembly strongly support their passion for the Climate Change Action. While many of these topics are discussed, positioned and addressed during these conferences, many of these global frameworks are based upon certain aspects of society that is ever-so quick in developing. This is why it is important to understand how meeting every 2 years will impact the issues that are arising. Furthermore, from the Sustainable Development Goals, SDG 11 expresses the dire need for resilient and smart cities (which the rapid technological growth). Hence, bringing some of these frameworks together engenders a broader scope in understanding how to address the issues of our sustainable development for our planet.

Likewise, the New Urban Agenda was an outcome document for Habitat III. Therefore, when we observe the timeframe for the NUA, we see that the strategy is framed upon 20 years. So, every 20 years, we observe the new urban agenda unfolding before the next habitat—essentially laying the groundwork for WUF (World Urban Forum). As discussed by many stakeholders/parities the timeframe of a certain movement or development is crucial to understanding the ‘position’ of the “issues addressed” while the members of the global framework meet. What we start to see is how all these global frameworks are cross-walking each other to make relevant implementations for such other frameworks.

In this articleattached, the World Bank discussed the World Urban Forum as a world primer conference convened by the UN-Habitat. The theme for WUF9 is “Cities 2030, Cities for all: Implementing the New Urban Agenda”. This NUA was a framework developed at Habitat III to achieve the SDGs and Agenda 2030. With a collaboration with many stakeholders including and not limited to the government and civil society, the World Bank’s participation at WUF9 included panels and a handful of World Bank-hosted events with the Business Assembly. As a participant of the WUF9, the World bank held a series of discussions with its global partnerships on building “inclusive, resilient, and sustainable cities and communities for all”.

WUF10 focuses on the following SDGs: SDG 5 – Gender Equality, SDG 8 – Decent Work & Economic Growth, SDG 9 – Industry, Innovation & Infrastructure, and SDG 11 – Sustainable Cities & Communities. With the recent industrial revolution and many dialogues on equality, the vision of WUF10 is to increase overall awareness of the sustainable urbanization issues along with understanding how to leverage stakeholder cooperation on a global scale. This initiative is a continuation and addition from WUF9 to learn all we can on a global scale and bring partnerships together to create the most viable and “sustainable” output through this framework. I’m excited to see how sustainable urban development will be unraveled through implementation of global frameworks like SDGs and those aforementioned, on February of 2020 in Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates.

Reference:

https://www.worldbank.org/en/events/2018/02/07/world-urban-forum