Tag Archives: UrbanSDG

Planning in the Global South: new publication

Posted on by
Reply

The Companion to Planning in the Global South, edited by Gautam Bhan, Smita Srinivas, and Vanessa Watson, is newly published by Routledge, and available for libraries to order (the cost is otherwise quite steep, although there is a lower cost edition for South Asia due to be published shortly). The collection is another contribution to ongoing debates about ‘southern urbanism’ and related topics, as the blurb makes clear:

“The Routledge Companion to Planning in the Global South offers an edited collection on planning in parts of the world which, more often than not, are unrecognised or unmarked in mainstream planning texts. In doing so, its intention is not to fill a ‘gap’ that leaves this ‘mainstream’ unquestioned but to re-theorise planning from a deep understanding of ‘place’ as well as a commitment to recognise the diverse modes of practice that come within it.

The chapters thus take the form not of generalised, ‘universal’ analyses and prescriptions, but instead are critical and located reflections in thinking about how to plan, act and intervene in highly complex city, regional and national contexts. Chapter authors in this Companion are not all planners, or are planners of very different kinds, and this diversity ensures a rich variety of insights, primarily based on cases, to emphasise the complexity of the world in which planning is expected to happen.”

Sue Parnell and I have a chapter in the collection, reflecting on the significance of SDG 11 (the ‘urban SDG’) and the so-called ‘new urban agenda’, extending the argument of our earlier piece on these issues. You can get the Introduction to the whole collection here.

Challenges of the New Urban Agenda

Posted on by
Reply

More recommended reading for the New Year, this time a critical reflection  on the potential implications of the translation of the ‘urban SDG‘ (Goal 11 of the Sustainable Development Goals) into UN-Habitat III’s New Urban Agenda, by my Exeter colleague Federico Caprotti and 8 co-authors (I think it is in the nature of this whole field of global-level urban policy innovation that making sense of things means collaborating with plenty of others).  It is published in Urban Research and Practice.

Here is the abstract:

“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.”

Environment and Urbanization Issue on the New Urban Agenda

Posted on by
Reply

To coincide with an event at the IIED today focussing on the likely outcomes of the Habitat III process, and assessing the so-called ‘new urban agenda’, all of the papers in the April 2016 issue of Environment and Urbanization are freely available between the 5th and 12th May (including the previously advertised paper by myself and Sue Parnell on the place of urban theory in current global urban policy debates). The issue includes a series of papers on the theme From the MDGs to the SDGs and Habitat III. Further details and reflections on the event will be posted on the IIED website in due course. 

Urban Theory in the New Urban Agenda

Posted on by
Reply

eanduThe latest issue of Environment and Urbanization contains a collection of papers examining different aspects of the emergence of the so-called ‘new urban agenda’ in global development policy, titled From the MDGs to the SDGs and Habitat III. It includes the paper by myself and Sue Parnell, ‘Ideas, implementation and indicators: epistemologies of the post-2015 urban agenda‘ which tracks some of the intellectual influences circulating around these worlds of policy-making and agenda-setting (Sue also has another piece tracing the longer history of global urban development agendas in World Development).

To repeat a previous invitation, if you would like a copy of our paper, do let me know and I will forward it along. Once more, here is the abstract for the paper:

“The success of the campaign for a dedicated urban Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) reflected a consensus on the importance of “cities” in sustainable development. The relevance accorded to cities in the SDGs is twofold, reflected both in the specific place-based content of the Urban Goal and the more general concern with the multiple scales at which the SDGs will be monitored will be institutionalized. Divergent views of the city and urban processes, suppressed within the Urban Goal, are, however, likely to become more explicit as attention shifts to implementation. Acknowledging the different theoretical traditions used to legitimize the new urban agenda is an overdue task. As this agenda develops post-2015, the adequacy of these forms of urban theory will become more contested around, among other concerns, the possibilities and limits of place-based policy, advocacy and activism; and ways of monitoring and evaluating processes of urban transformation along multiple axes of development.”

Urban Theory and the Urban SDG

Posted on by
Reply

IMG_3127Sue Parnell and I have a paper, “Ideas, implementation and indicators: epistemologies of the post-2015 urban agenda“, forthcoming in Environment and Urbanization, in a special issue dedicated to exploring the significance of the so-called ‘urban SDG’ and the associated ‘new urban agenda’ associated with the Habitat III conference later this year. Our paper explores the intellectual background to the campaign that culminated in the inclusion of the ‘urban’ goal (Goal 11, which commits to making cities “inclusive, safe, resilient, and sustainable”).

If you’d like a journal-ready copy of the piece, let me know. Here is the abstract of our paper:

“The success of the campaign for a dedicated urban Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) reflected a consensus on the importance of “cities” in sustainable development. The relevance accorded to cities in the SDGs is twofold, reflected both in the specific place-based content of the Urban Goal and the more general concern with the multiple scales at which the SDGs will be monitored will be institutionalized. Divergent views of the city and urban processes, suppressed within the Urban Goal, are, however, likely to become more explicit as attention shifts to implementation. Acknowledging the different theoretical traditions used to legitimize the new urban agenda is an overdue task. As this agenda develops post-2015, the adequacy of these forms of urban theory will become more contested around, among other concerns, the possibilities and limits of place-based policy, advocacy and activism; and ways of monitoring and evaluating processes of urban transformation along multiple axes of development.”

Urban thought and its problems

Posted on by
1

IMG_3222Here is the full version of a paper presented last week at the Annual Meeting of the Association of American Geographers, in Chicago, entitled ‘Problematizations: situating contemporary urban thought‘. It’s the first effort to say out loud something about different strands of work I have been doing as part of my Leverhulme-funded project on ‘the urbanization of responsibility‘. It’s very much a work in progress.