The New Urban Agenda: key opportunities and challenges for policy and practice

The UN-HABITAT III conference held in Quito in late 2016 enshrined the first Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) with an exclusively urban focus. SDG 11, as it became known, aims to make cities more inclusive, safe, resilient and sustainable through a range of metrics, indicators, and evaluation systems. It also became part of a post-Quito ‘New Urban Agenda’ that is still taking shape. This paper raises questions around the potential for reductionism in this new agenda, and argues for the reflexive need to be aware of the types of urban space that are potentially sidelined by the new trends in global urban policy.

[1]  Sheila Jasanoff,et al.  Risk management and political culture , 1986 .

[2]  N Krieger,et al.  Epidemiology and the web of causation: has anyone seen the spider? , 1994, Social science & medicine.

[3]  N Krieger,et al.  Theories for social epidemiology in the 21st century: an ecosocial perspective. , 2001, International journal of epidemiology.

[4]  Kate Noble,et al.  Sustainable cities , 2004 .

[5]  S. Jasanoff.  States of Knowledge: The Co-production of Science and the Social Order , 2004 .

[6]  Local statistics are crucial to localizing the MDGs. , 2005 .

[7]  Meeting the MDGS in Urban Areas: The Forgotten Role of Local Organizations , 2005 .

[8]  Simon Marvin,et al.  Researching the Sustainable City: Three Modes of Interdisciplinarity , 2006 .

[9]  Suzan Ilcan,et al.  Developmentalities and Calculative Practices: The Millennium Development Goals , 2010 .

[10]  The fall and rise of the expert , 2011 .

[11]  Vanesa Castán Broto,et al.  Social housing and low carbon transitions in Ljubljana, Slovenia , 2012 .

[12]  Matthijs Rooduijn.  The Mesmerising Message: The Diffusion of Populism in Public Debates in Western European Media , 2014 .

[13]  D. Chandler.  Resilience: The Governance of Complexity , 2014 .

[14]  A. Niekerk,et al.  Monitoring sustainable urban development using built-up area indicators: a case study of Stellenbosch, South Africa , 2015, Environment, Development and Sustainability.

[15]  Simon Joss.  Sustainable Cities: Governing for Urban Innovation , 2015 .

[16]  A. Picon.  Smart Cities: A Spatialised Intelligence , 2015 .

[17]  Simon Joss,et al.  Sustainable–Smart–Resilient–Low Carbon–Eco–Knowledge Cities; Making sense of a multitude of concepts promoting sustainable urbanization , 2015 .

[18]  Simon Joss,et al.  Tomorrow’s City Today: Prospects for Standardising Sustainable Urban Development , 2015 .

[19]  C. Brolan,et al.  “Everywhere but not specifically somewhere”: a qualitative study on why the right to health is not explicit in the post-2015 negotiations , 2015, BMC International Health and Human Rights.

[20]  David Hudson,et al.  Governing the UN sustainable development goals: interactions, infrastructures, and institutions. , 2015, The Lancet. Global health.

[21]  A. Vanolo.  Is there anybody out there? The place and role of citizens in tomorrow’s smart cities , 2016 .

[22]  HABITAT III – Toward a New Urban Agenda , 2016 .

[23]  Robert Costanza,et al.  The UN Sustainable Development Goals and the dynamics of well‐being , 2016 .

[24]  Olivia Conti.  Being digital citizens , 2016 .

[25]  S. Parnell.  Defining a Global Urban Development Agenda , 2016 .

[26]  Fetty Wijayanti,et al.  From the Millennium Development Goals to Sustainable Development Goals. , 2016, Journal of virus eradication.

[27]  Vincanne Adams,et al.  Metrics: What Counts in Global Health , 2016 .

[28]  Un-Habitat,et al.  neW URBAn AGendA , 2016 .

[29]  C. Barnett,et al.  Ideas, implementation and indicators: epistemologies of the post-2015 urban agenda , 2016 .

[30]  Track climate pledges of cities and companies , 2016, Nature.

[31]  M. Maslin,et al.  Adaptation responses to climate change differ between global megacities , 2016 .

[32]  C. Herrick.  An urban health worthy of the post-2015 era , 2016 .

[33]  W. Rahn,et al.  Rise of the Trumpenvolk , 2016 .

[34]  Federico Caprotti,et al.  Interrogating urban experiments , 2017 .

[35]  Haniza Khalid,et al.  UN sustainable development goals , 2019 .

[36]  T. Gross,et al.  For Personal Use. Only Reproduce with Permission from Elsevier Ltd Public Health Inequalities in Health between and within Countries: Poverty and Inequality Social Determinants of Health Inequalities , 2022 .