Mexico City Event Looks at Legal Underpinnings of the New Urban Agenda Emilio Godoy - Citiscope
go to original November 26, 2015

Mexico 2015 - The New Urban Agenda (World Economic Forum)

Civil society is stepping up pressure to create a legally binding international treaty on housing, urbanism and public space during next year’s Habitat III conference in Quito, Ecuador.

“The challenge is how to make cities more sustainable, to create urban ecosystems. If we don’t care for the place we live in, current problems will become insurmountable,” said Arturo Mejía, a consultant from Ecuador, on the sidelines of a recent Urban Thinkers Campus (UTC) held here.

U.N. participants at the four-day event likewise saw Habitat III, the once-every-20-year summit on urbanization, as an important starting point to standardizing new legal approaches to ensuring sustainable urban development.

“We have to see how we engage with the urban agenda in order to build a new paradigm based on new laws and rights,” said Ricardo Jordán, the head of the Human Settlements Unit at the U.?N. Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean’s (ECLAC). “The sustainable city is built upon a sound legal foundation. We have to see how we guarantee the right to a sustainable city.”

The Mexico City event, held 17-20 November, was one of more than two dozen such thematic campuses being held around the world to gather stakeholder input for the drafting of the New Urban Agenda, the 20-year urbanization strategy that will come out of Habitat III. The UTCs are an initiative of UN-Habitat’s World Urban Campaign.

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