From Habitat II to Pachamama: a growing agenda and diminishing expectations for Habitat III

Abstract

Preparations for the upcoming United Nations Conference on Housing and Sustainable Urban Development (Habitat III) in Quito in October 2016 have included a wide range of meetings and work on a negotiated outcome document entitled “The New Urban Agenda”. This is intended to present a global consensus on the significance and challenges of human settlements, as well as a Global Plan of Action. What can reasonably be expected from these activities? Will a meaningful and substantively appropriate “new urban agenda” emerge from the discussions? If so, what is the likelihood that it can actually be implemented? Or is all this activity and expense a waste of time and human energy? This article examines the results of the Habitat I and Habitat II conferences, the weakness of the associated monitoring and evaluation, and the changing dynamics of human settlements since 1996. It provides a forward-looking assessment of both the likely results of Habitat III and the issues to be faced subsequently.

Prologue

In 1996, Sultan Habitat II called all his subjects from all corners of the world to come to Istanbul to consider how they were living together and how they might improve their lives. Despite the disappointment with the forgotten Sultan Habitat I, who had had many good ideas but never did anything about them, Habitat II wanted his people to understand the need for them to take responsibility for their lives.

As he travelled, he had seen many bad things: cities that had become thirsty, children sleeping in streets, houses blown over by the wind or under water. But most disturbing was that he saw people in different corners of the world repeating their mistakes – over and over. They needed guidance. How could they solve their problems? They needed to talk to each other. The world needed to become a school.

So he called everyone together: the people who ate rice and built great walls, the people who worshipped many gods and believed in sacred cows, people who drove machines on flat, hard roads, and people who had built great pyramids, temples and cities. For Sultan Habitat II, the most disturbing thing he heard from his people was their fear of the future.

After a week in Istanbul, after many meetings, meals and drinks, the people decided to publish a long book with many words, which they would name for the Sultan, the Habitat Agenda, and in which they would promise to solve all of their problems. But the book was so long that no one could remember any of the promises. Soon after, the Sultan was discouraged to see that his meeting in Istanbul was largely forgotten. In fact, no one ever referred again to the book named for him.

Many years later – so many years that they called the years a generation – another ruler, this one in a far-off land near the Equator, whose name was Pachamama, also decided to call all of the peoples together, to see how they could make life better, how they could discover the buen vivir. Pachamama was a strong ruler, actually known by her people as Mother Earth. Before she decided to call her people together, she wondered, what could I learn from Sultan Habitat II? Why is he forgotten? Will I be forgotten too?

I. Introduction

There is increasing activity and attention being given by the urban and local government communities to the upcoming United Nations Habitat III conference in Quito, Ecuador in October 2016. As defined by the UN General Assembly, this conference is expected to address the challenges facing “human settlements”, both urban and rural, in all countries. The specific mandate of the conference is to produce “a new urban agenda” that is supposed to guide nation states in the formulation of policies and programmes intended to manage human settlements. The approval of a UN General Assembly resolution on the holding of this global conference has given way to a set of preparatory activities, which have their own organizational and technocratic logic. This includes:

• Meetings of Preparatory Committees of UN member states in 2014, 2015, and 2016 and the election of a Bureau of the Conference composed of representatives of selected national governments;

• Thematic meetings around the world intended to examine specific issues such as metropolitan government, housing, urban safety, rural–urban linkages, and the specific problems of secondary cities, among others;

• Creation of 10 “policy units” composed of experts from around the world to develop policy recommendations for the Habitat III conference to consider;

• Preparation of a negotiated “final outcome document” to reflect a global consensus on the significance of human settlements, their challenges, and criteria by which to recognize successful policies and programmes. This document has been titled “The New Urban Agenda”. It is also to be accompanied by a Global Plan of Action document.

All of these activities – and many more – are intended to encourage the participation of people from all countries in discussions of human settlements.

A question to be asked is what can reasonably be expected to be the outcome of this activity, including the conference and the documents themselves. Are the debates and discussions leading up to the conference actually expected to determine the content of a meaningful and substantively appropriate “new urban agenda”, as requested by the UN General Assembly? And if so, what is the likelihood that all or parts of this new urban agenda could actually be implemented? Or, simply put, is all of this activity and expense a waste of time and human energy?

The answers to these questions are never easy. Most well-meaning global citizens would hope that a UN initiative of this scale and ambition would have a highly significant and positive result, with the material consequences of improving people’s lives, their welfare and their opportunities. Given the now-understood linkages between cities and climate change as documented by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC),⁽¹⁾ it could also be expected that a UN Conference on Human Settlements could contribute to solutions to the growing threats of climate change.

This article proposes to answer these questions by examining several dimensions of the recent history of intergovernmental initiatives, including:

• The results of the Habitat I and Habitat II conferences;

• The weakness of the monitoring and evaluation of the fulfilment of prior commitments made by nation states at the Habitat II conference in Istanbul in 1996;

• The changing dynamics of human settlements from 1996 to 2016;

• A forward-looking assessment of the likely results of Habitat III; and

• The issues nation states and cities will actually have to face after Habitat III.

II. The Results of the Habitat I and Habitat II Conferences

Any assessment of the prospects for Habitat III should include some reflection on the prior experience from Habitat I in 1976, Habitat II in 1996, and the period from 1996 to 2016.

A forward-looking assessment of this type is necessarily risky because global circumstances have changed, new leadership is in place, and the political calculus of stakeholders and participants has changed over time. Nonetheless, we are obliged to learn from the past if we are to build a better future.

a. Habitat I

The Habitat I conference, held in Vancouver, Canada in June 1976, was a result of the 1972 United Nations Conference on the Environment held in Stockholm. That conference was spurred by the urgings of Barbara Ward and Rene Dubos in their book, Only One Earth: Care and Maintenance of a Small Planet,⁽²⁾ to consider all human settlements. This book created the political mandate to hold the first United Nations Conference on Human Settlements. The three major accomplishments of Habitat I were: 1) to strongly encourage all governments to consider human geography in their development policies and to establish ministries and agencies responsible for territorial planning and management, 2) to establish a United Nations Centre for Human Settlements, which would be based in Nairobi, Kenya, and 3) to encourage the creation of civil society organizations focused on urban issues.

The first accomplishment, strong advice to national governments in the form of 64 recommendations that they needed to consider territorial planning and management in their development efforts, was consistent with international development thinking at the time. It followed the clear message from the 1969 Report on International Development by the Pearson Commission⁽³⁾ that many low- and middle-income countries were experiencing “growth without development”, with little progress being made to reduce poverty or inequality. It also reinforced the new orientation of the World Bank under President Robert McNamara, which had focused new attention on rural development in 1973 and on cities in 1975.⁽⁴⁾ Habitat I was a clear endorsement of the idea that “place matters” in the welfare of people.

The political meaning of Habitat I was also closely linked to the strength and well-articulated commitment of Canadian Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau to this new development agenda. Habitat I was divided into two parts: a formal meeting of governments under a UN framework and a civil society forum that was largely dominated by architects and advocates of low-cost housing. Global leaders and urban thinkers who spoke at events in the forum included Barbara Ward, Buckminster Fuller, Mother Teresa, Margaret Mead, John F C Turner and Jorge Hardoy. A competition for low-cost housing design was also held, with the winning entry later being constructed in Manila.

The second outcome of Habitat I was the creation of a new UN centre, the first to be located in Africa,⁽⁵⁾ which was to be devoted to the field of human settlements. Its first executive director was Arcot Ramachandran, an energetic Indian scientist and former secretary of the Department of Science and Technology of the government of India. The new agency, the United Nations Centre for Human Settlements, was created in 1977 under the authority of the United Nations Commission on Human Settlements (UNCHS). The Centre’s effectiveness was challenged by its location, the lack of experienced staff and severe financial limitations. Later, in 2002, UNCHS was transformed into a full United Nations Programme on Human Settlements and officially known as UN-Habitat.

The third outcome was the encouragement given to civil society organizations with urban interests. The Stockholm Conference on the Human Environment had led to the formation of a UN-NGO Committee on Human Settlements, which became officially responsible for organizing the Habitat Forum in Vancouver. It was later transformed into the Habitat International Coalition (HIC), based in Mexico City, which became a global civil society organization. HIC later became a leading voice for groups facing evictions by national and local governments.

Looking back, it is apparent that Habitat I never actually provided a valid policy foundation for changes in country macro-economic or sector policies. The late 1970s was a period of global and economic financial instability following the 1973 Middle East war, the emergence of the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC), and dramatically higher energy prices, which undermined the development strategies of most countries. Despite the end of the Vietnam War in 1975, the world was still in the grips of the Cold War and there was widespread political unrest in Latin America, Africa and parts of Asia. Military coups, repression of human rights and an unsettling belief that democracy was unlikely to flourish in these conditions occupied global and national political attention. Four years later, the period of Reagan and Thatcher took over, and with it came conservative pressures to reduce the size and capacity of governments. A meaningful focus on human settlements was hardly a desideratum in this context.

This conservative perspective shifted somewhat after the end of the Cold War. On one hand there was a triumphalism in the West arguing that state-controlled economies had failed, as evidenced by the “end of history” narrative of many authors,⁽⁶⁾ but at the same time the end of Cold War confrontation opened up possibilities for civil society participation in many countries. This also supported a new belief in the possibility that multilateral cooperation could mount a global agenda. It was a period of reduced expectations about the role of the state in effectively promoting and guiding development, yet there nonetheless was some optimism that multilateral solutions were possible.

The Earth Summit, or the United Nations Conference on Environment and Development, in Rio de Janeiro in 1992, became a focus for some of these efforts. This meeting was quite successful in its approval of “Agenda 21”, a global environmental agenda, and its support for a major treaty on biodiversity, but there was little emphasis on the urban environment. Looking back, it is possible to describe the Habitat I experience as having focused on settlements without nature. As the preparations for the Earth Summit showed, the Rio meeting would focus on nature, but without people.

Anticipating the lack of attention to cities at the Earth Summit, a World Urban Forum – which sought to focus on the “brown agenda”, the urban environmental agenda, rather than the “green agenda” – was organized and held in Curitiba, Brazil in May 1992, prior to the Rio meeting. This event, led by then Curitiba Mayor Jaime Lerner, who had demonstrated in his city that urban environmental improvements were possible, served to mobilize support for a second Habitat conference. This event, attended by numerous mayors, the king and queen of Sweden, and many NGOs, was the precursor of subsequent World Urban Forum meetings, which began several years after Habitat II.

b. Habitat II

In contrast to the Habitat I experience, the Habitat II conference, held in Istanbul in June 1996, was a much more significant and ambitious initiative. It was the last of the series of UN global conferences that took place during the 1990s. One of the key aspects of Habitat II was that it was prepared through elaborate meetings around the world during 1991–1992 and a much wider orchestrated outreach to civil society organizations, particularly local government organizations such as the International Union of Local Authorities, Cités Unies France and Metropolis.

Habitat II had the following major components:

• An official conference, which negotiated the Habitat Agenda and a global action plan of commitments by national governments to address urban problems;

• Participation from over 3,000 delegates from 171 countries, as well as over 300 parliamentarians, 579 local authorities, 341 people from intergovernmental organizations, and 2,400 NGO representatives;

• A parallel NGO Forum, which had 8,000 registered representatives, about 30 per cent from Turkey;

• Special fora for many interest groups and constituencies;

• During the 16-day NGO Forum, 1,700 meetings and events;

• For the first time in a UN conference, invitation of NGOs to speak, participate in working groups and help draft agenda recommendations;

• Production of the Habitat Agenda, a 191-page document with hundreds of commitments made by governments, including a Global Plan of Action;

• National reports from 140 countries; and

• Thematic one-day dialogues.

This event was generally positive, without much overt conflict between countries except over whether the conference would endorse a “right to housing”, a proposal that was strongly opposed by the United States, Saudi Arabia, the Vatican and Colombia. The latter three countries joined with the United States in the hope that they might, in exchange, gain US support to reverse the agreements about the role of women and family planning that had been adopted by the UN’s World Conference on Women in Beijing and International Conference on Population and Development in Cairo. Participants felt they were part of a global happening and that everyone “was under the same tent”. UNCHS was pleased that it had facilitated widespread and meaningful civil society participation for the first time in UN history. While there was some tension between representatives of national and local governments, this did not have much substantive effect, except perhaps that the final outcome documents, the Habitat Agenda and the Istanbul Declaration, were longer and included all of the recommendations from both levels of government.

In contrast to Habitat I, there was extensive press coverage and subsequent critical reflections about Habitat II. These points of critique included the following:

• There was a concern that the event, unlike some of the other UN conferences, notably the Earth Summit, had generated little tension. This suggested that there were no real stakes involved in either the decisions to be taken and declarations to be made or in the strong demands for policy and institutional change.⁽⁷⁾

• As a result there was no real change in the substance of urban policy debates. More people had participated; so-called “best practice” examples had been identified; but few were convinced that the Istanbul meeting had been a watershed event.

• The event’s success had been more in process terms and particularly its broad representation of civil society groups and the recognition of the critical role of local government organizations. This was the first of the UN conferences of the 1990s where such broad representation had been permitted and achieved.

• Despite the fact that the World Bank had made a public commitment to lend some US$ 15 billion over the next five-year period, a massive increase in international financial aid for cities, this was largely ignored by nation states and the NGOs, suggesting perhaps that after almost 25 years of World Bank urban assistance, the wider community no longer considered this to be significant or, worse still, credible.

• The event was followed by insinuations of financial mismanagement by UN-Habitat, which led to its paralysis for several years.

• If Habitat I had focused on territorial planning and housing, without the environment, Habitat II had recognized the urban environment, but had not gone far enough to raise the alarm on climate change.⁽⁸⁾

• While Habitat II had taken place during the first phase of growing awareness of the power and consequences of globalization, there was very little attention on the impact of globalization on cities or the growing role of cities in generating GDP.

• Much of the debate had remained in silos. Housing people talked to each other; women’s groups talked to women; environmentalists talked to each other; but there was not much discussion across constituencies.

• Most proposed analysis of issues of human settlements was within disciplines and not cross-disciplinary.

III. Monitoring Progress Towards the Fulfilment of Habitat II Agenda Commitments

In addition to these critiques, there were two categories of observations that deserve special attention: the confused approach to implementation of the Habitat II agenda and the lack of an effective mechanism to monitor the fulfilment of the commitments of Habitat II. Both of these have proven to be particularly important.

With regard to implementation, responsibility for which was given first to national governments and secondly to local governments, K C Sivaramakrishnan, former Director-General of the Calcutta Metropolitan Development Authority and later Secretary to the Government of India for Urban Development, observed that the Global Plan of Action (GPA) “did not set the Bosphorus on fire”. He remarked soon after the conference:

“With 238 closely worded paragraphs, it is certainly one of the more compendious documents to have been processed through a conference of this type. Unfortunately from the very beginning and through the preparatory process, attempts to be selective and focus on critical issues did not succeed. GPA’s impact will therefore have to be gauged from its breadth rather than brevity: from its usefulness as a compendium of reference points for present and future thinking rather than the forthrightness, if any, of its recommendations.”⁽⁹⁾

He also noted that the GPA’s section on capacity building had emphasized decentralization and participatory urban management processes as critical. But the approach to these issues had been so simplified that they did not recognize the complexities and nuances involved. He commented:

“Whatever will be the initial delineation of functions between different levels of government, the allocation of tasks and distribution of resources will need frequent adjustments and inter-governmental collaboration. A blanket approach to decentralization may well inhibit the aggregation needed for perception and action at the metropolitan levels.”⁽¹⁰⁾

Sivaramakrishnan further noted that “the GPA also shared the recently found enthusiasm for the private provision of infrastructure services as well as public partnerships. But the GPA did not contribute any additional wisdom to the debate.”⁽¹¹⁾

These are only a few examples of the general and not very useful character of the GPA in the post-Habitat II years. In sum, the document’s problems included too many recommended actions, no prioritization, and a level of generality that was not very useful for policy-makers at any levels of government.

This conclusion is consistent with the observation about the Habitat II documents made by David Satterthwaite in the February 1997 meeting at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in Washington:

“Although the commitment to tackle poverty and its various manifestations is clearly stated, the documents do not set out realistic means to do so – or to address poverty’s underlying causes. This is a weakness they share with most other international UN conferences, which achieved little in setting up effective international mechanisms to promote progress toward the commitments made. This is a weakness that Habitat II also shares with its predecessor, the first UN Conference on Human Settlements, as there was little attempt to evaluate the performance of governments in regard to the Recommendations for National Action that they had formally endorsed at that earlier Conference in 1976.”⁽¹²⁾

Satterthwaite’s observations have proven to be prescient with regard to both implementation and the lack of monitoring of the fulfilment of national commitments to policy reform and programme implementation. He noted at the time that “there is no provision for the kind of independent assessment and monitoring that will hold governments accountable if they fail to implement the recommendations they have endorsed.”⁽¹³⁾ While the UN General Assembly and the UN Economic and Social Council (ECOSOC) were supposed to review and assess progress, this process was intended to benefit from the active role of the UN Commission on Human Settlements, supported by UNCHS. But as Satterthwaite observed, “all these institutions have structural limitations on their capacity to take governments and international agencies to task if they (and the donor agencies that help fund them) fail to respond to the commitments they have endorsed.”⁽¹⁴⁾

This failure to monitor Habitat II commitments became painfully clear at the April 2015 Preparatory Committee 2 meeting on Habitat III in Nairobi, when the UN regional commissions were asked in a public session if they were providing any assessment of progress on Habitat II commitments. Each of the representatives clearly indicated that they too had no responsibility for this task and it would be covered in the reports by national governments. This was simply passing the buck, because there is no incentive for national governments to publicly acknowledge that they have failed to meet their commitments. When the question of assessment was raised, neither governments nor UN-Habitat staff publicly supported the idea of looking back at the results of Habitat II. Privately, they agreed that such an assessment was needed.

IV. The Changing Dynamics of Human Settlements from 1996 to 2016

The stories of Habitat I and Habitat II are disturbing. Both represented significant international efforts to focus attention on the challenges facing human settlements, yet neither seems to have had much impact on urban and rural areas in low- and middle-income countries. This section identifies some of the new dynamics of human settlements over the past 20 years as an important consideration of what issues will need to be addressed by the third conference, Habitat III. The dynamics now seen in cities have changed. The most significant changes relate to inequality, followed by economic growth and then climate change. Each is described below.

a. Inequality

• An accelerating and sustained concentration of urban private wealth and a worsening of urban inequality, as suggested by Thomas Piketty,⁽¹⁵⁾ complementing earlier work by Joseph Stiglitz⁽¹⁶⁾ and others.

• A growing gap between private and public wealth, leading to an increase in the adoption of private urban solutions in cities in both rich and poor countries, such as gated communities, private education, private security and private transport. In the absence of public services of acceptable quality, the urban poor are also forced to rely on expensive and often poor-quality urban services such as water supply, sanitation, schools and clinics.⁽¹⁷⁾

• A growing gap in the investment in the human capital of the rich and the poor in cities in all countries.

• Growing informality in urban economies, with a faster rate of job creation in the informal than in the formal sector.

• The continued financial depreciation and physical deterioration of public infrastructure such as roads, bridges, water supply, sewerage, drainage and lighting due to the absence of adequate expenditures for operations and maintenance.⁽¹⁸⁾ This has led to massive infrastructure deficits, exacerbated by continued urban demographic growth, and contributing to great differences in access to infrastructure services.

• Growing manifestation of racial, ethnic and class disparities in income, wealth and opportunities, leading to competition and conflict among groups seeking upward mobility within cities.⁽¹⁹⁾

• The deterioration of the quality of public goods as reflected in air pollution, groundwater pollution and inadequate solid waste management.

• Continued demographic growth of urban areas in low- and middle-income countries, particularly in secondary centres and peri-urban areas of large cities.⁽²⁰⁾ This growth is in absolute terms, despite reductions in fertility in developing countries. The result is a growing “youth bulge” and, exacerbated by slower economic growth, high youth unemployment in many countries.⁽²¹⁾

• The deterioration of housing conditions and the growth of informal settlements, resulting from housing policies unable to keep up with demand for affordable low-cost housing solutions.⁽²²⁾

• The qualitative change in urban form also implied by increased spatial scale, with increasing costs of mobility and reduced access to employment and services.⁽²³⁾

b. Economic growth

• A slowing down of macro-economic growth in most countries since 2008, implying slower growth of the 70 per cent of GDP coming from urban areas. The productivity and contribution of cities to national economic welfare cannot be taken for granted.

• The weakening financial strength of local governments beyond major cities, as a result of undependable intergovernmental financial flows from financially strapped national governments and the slow growth of effective municipal tax bases.

c. Climate change

• The contribution by urban areas to climate change through carbon dioxide emissions and through high levels of energy consumption.

• The concentration of global wealth and increasingly vulnerable populations in urban areas, increasing the risk from the potential impacts of climate change.⁽²⁴⁾

• The high percentage of the world’s population living in urban areas within 50 miles of the coast.

• The particular vulnerability of urban areas to sea level rise and other effects of climate change.

Together, these dynamic trends suggest that in the future cities will become more unequal, larger in population with greater demand for essential services, more spread out in terms of urban form, increasingly difficult and expensive to provision, less productive because of the need for increasing amounts of infrastructure, and at high risk of climate change impacts. Historically urban policy communities and civil society organizations have not worked on how these various dynamics interact and what kinds of outcomes are likely. Yet seeing the linkages to global and national problems is critical for building a political understanding of the urgency of addressing these city-level problems.

V. The Requirements for a Successful Habitat III

The trends listed above stand in sharp contrast to the weak results of the two major international conferences on human settlements held by the United Nations in 1976 and 1996. These current issues are highly significant and call for urgent recognition and remedy. Yet global efforts, in the form of international urban assistance and the United Nations-led discussions of urban policy, have not been commensurate with the scale, depth and urgency of the problems.

This asymmetry between the problems and the international capacity and political will to remedy them suggests that Pachamama, the metaphor for the Habitat III conference, will have to be much more energetic and effective than her predecessors in generating positive outcomes that can make a difference.

For Habitat III to be successful, six immediate results will have to be achieved:

1. Participation : First, participation in Habitat III as a process and an event should be much wider than in the earlier conferences. An imaginative and aggressive use of Internet technology and social media could play a major role in broadening citizen and local government involvement. Creating a new global urban consciousness and a political movement would be essential instruments for significant change. Any real impact from these processes and events would ultimately depend on committed, visionary leadership and the global mobilization of civil society. While the activities of UN-Habitat reflect sincere and active engagement, they are limited by the scarcity of resources and of truly committed global partners. One small UN agency in Nairobi cannot realistically hope to produce significant change to the urban dynamics listed above.

2. Clear and common language : Secondly, the content of recommendations in a new urban agenda should be sharply defined, in simple and clear terms. They cannot be wrapped up in a negotiated United Nations language that will not be understandable to the world at large. The recommendations should be compelling and convey a real sense of urgency. Less will be more. Lengthy documents reflect the footprints of the past. It is time for a new articulation to address the compelling challenges of the urban future. This issue is of course complicated by the diplomatic control of United Nations and multilateral processes. The question, therefore, is twofold: Will the diplomats let go and, if they do, will there be other institutional actors who will effectively join in the effort to refine and communicate a global message about urban areas?

3. Recognition of the importance of the urban agenda by national governments : Even if there is a global mobilization around Habitat III to assert the importance and urgency of urban issues, ultimately that mobilization will have had little effect if national governments do not recognize the importance of the urban agenda as integral to the management of the macro-economy, the sustenance of the environment, and the promotion of social justice and political democracy.

   Obtaining this recognition should be a primary objective of the process leading to the conference and of the conference itself. This is no small order. Over the last decade, the G20 has resolutely ignored urban areas as the loci of the production of 70 per cent of GDP in most countries and as the spaces where inequality, unemployment and social conflict are most evident. This tunnel vision on the part of macro-economists continues to limit the benefits to be gained from the productivity of the urban economy and particularly affects the growing number of low-income people in both industrialized and developing countries.

4. Linkages with agendas of cities and metropolitan areas : Fourth, the commitments of the new urban agenda should be linked, within national urban policies, to the actual priorities of cities and metropolitan areas. At present the new urban agenda is being negotiated with UN member states and national governments, but its fulfilment will depend heavily on local engagement and commitment. This implies the need for much stronger engagement by local governments, global and national organizations, and other local political constituencies. The political tasks of engaging and mobilizing these organizations are enormous and probably will not succeed, even if UN-Habitat and some key national governments decide to dramatically increase the authority and resources needed for local governments to play these roles.

5. Financial commitments : Fifth, these recommendations should be accompanied by financial resources to actually fulfil commitments by national and local governments. This is particularly difficult after the disappointing results of the UN Summit on Financing for Development held in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia in July 2015, which failed to agree on new sources of finance for development. Significant reform of urban finance, including capturing land value, strengthening local revenue collection, or increasing access to national and global financial markets, is a long-term goal. It will not be achieved by October 2016. Nor is it likely that the institutions responsible for these potential revenue sources will make, or be allowed to make, political and financial commitments in this area. The governance of cities is not, in most countries, supported by a major national government commitment to urban finance.

6. Independent monitoring : Finally, a strong and independent monitoring mechanism should be put in place to follow up the commitments on these issues. Such a mechanism might be an Intergovernmental Panel on Urbanization, analogous to the IPCC. This will be made more complicated by the September 2015 approval by the UN General Assembly of the 17 Sustainable Development Goals, which will themselves become the focus of a UN system monitoring and reporting exercise. The urban goal, Goal 11, is also composed of multiple targets, but these do not directly address the questions of urban poverty, inequality, or the all-important productivity of the urban economy. It will be more difficult to assure effective monitoring and reporting of any of the commitments of Habitat III in this wider UN system context.

Finally, building the political will to achieve these six results is unlikely to be the result of business as usual by UN and national government negotiators. As noted above, there is an urgent need for a special kind of transcendent leadership and language that all governments and their peoples can recognize and respect.

This is the moment for a Pachamama, in a metaphorical sense, to step forward and to assert, with respect and affection for her peoples, that we are all in this together, here at the Equator, in the centre of the Earth. There is no time for divisiveness or special interests. Habitat II should be a moment for the assertion of the planetary interest, and that is something all of us should be able to agree upon.

VI. Thinking Beyond Habitat III

The timing of the Habitat III event is both too soon and too far away. There is not enough time to assemble all of the necessary pieces to achieve desired results and there is more than enough time for the damaging dynamics listed above to further consolidate and deepen. Inserting an urban agenda within a broader agenda for sustainable social and economic progress is an important and urgent task. While there is a need for quantum change – moving to some significant transformation of current patterns of destructive societal and human behaviour – this kind of change is unlikely to occur without a disaster that can frighten national and local governments into undertaking needed reform.

This suggests that the threat of climate change might ultimately become an important political instrument in the advocacy and acceptance of new rules and new policy frameworks. The recently adopted Sustainable Development Goals may contribute to this process, but their large number and even larger number of targets may frustrate the possibility of general public knowledge. More important will be whether national governments actually accept the need to monitor their implementation and thus introduce some accountability into the post-Habitat III era.

Experience suggests that our expectations of the efficacy of United Nations processes and events should be modest. Yet 40 years after the Vancouver conference of 1976, the world has dramatically changed, with globalization, the Internet, the collapse of political empires, and now the instantaneous sharing of information. Politics has changed and in no place more than in urban areas. The sources of change may now appear obscure, but the underlying dynamics suggest the inevitability of change if only because the limits of natural resources and new sources of environmental vulnerability demand adaptation by everyone. It is appropriate and perhaps ironic that Habitat III should be held in Ecuador – the land of Pachamama – because foregrounding the importance of Mother Earth may, in the end, prove the most compelling and equally shared value that peoples and their governments can have.