UN HABITAT III

Every two decades, the world convenes at the United Nations Conference on Housing and Sustainable Urban Development (HABITAT) to debate urban growth and governance, the changing patterns of human settlement, and the face of future cities. The third, much-anticipated assembly, known as HABITAT III, will take place in Quito, Ecuador this fall—forty years after the inaugural meeting in Vancouver in 1976, and twenty years after Istanbul in 1996.

The rise of megacities, with their vast resources and equally enormous demands, has powered municipalities into an expanded role in international affairs. During last year’s international climate negotiations in Paris, a coalition of cities, regions, and sub-national actors wielded substantial influence, lobbying for concrete action and proposing policy ideas independent of the negotiating position of their respective national governments.

Recent headlines (“The city-state returns” “Nations are no longer driving globalization—cities are”) and new books (“If Mayors Ruled the World: Dysfunctional Nations, Rising Cities”) have also trumpeted this shifting terrain, in addition to observers of the COP21 in Paris last December. Habitat III continues this momentum, as mayors and their civil society partners play an increasingly active role in defining the global urban agenda, not only as supplicants to national governments, but as meaningful actors in their own right.