Background

In 2012, Partners of the World Urban Campaign have called for a new urban paradigm based on a critical review of current urbanization patterns and practices: To make sure we have the city we need in the 21st century cities our new urban paradigm will have to be guided by a set of principles preliminarily articulated in the Manifesto for Cities (…). We will have to translate these principles into policy action areas tailored to local conditions. 

The City We Need 2.0 encompasses ten principles:

1. The City We Need is socially inclusive and engaging
2. The City We Need is affordable, accessible and equitable
3. The City We Need is economically vibrant and inclusive
4. The City We Need is collectively managed and democratically governed 
5. The City We Need fosters cohesive territorial development
6. The City We Need is regenerative and resilient
7. The City We Need has shared identities and a sense of place
8. The City We Need is well-planned, walkable and transit-friendly
9. The City We Need is safe, healthy and promotes well-being
10. The City We Need learns and innovates 

and ten drivers of change:

1. Governance and Partnerships
2. Planning and Design
3. Finance
4. Land, Housing and Services
5. Environment
6. Health and Safety
7. Economy and Livelihoods
8. Education
9. Technology
10. Monitoring and Evaluation

Those have generated a series of urban solutions proposed after Urban Thinkers Campuses – Phase 1 and before the Habitat III Conference. Those implementable urban solutions were meant to be innovative, stimulating, inspiring, ambitious and grounded in the reality of communities and practice. In the post-Habitat III era the solutions were meant to be subject to further scrutiny and commitment to action. For the WUC Urban Thinkers, urban solutions have been conceived as initiatives, practices, policies and models that address urban challenges. They should range from projects to strategies that have been implemented or are in the course of being implemented, meant to have a proven impact on people’s lives, to be economically feasible, replicable and scalable, influencing transformation. 

From PRINCIPLES to DRIVERS OF CHANGE and URBAN SOLUTIONS, the next step is geared to ACTION to implement the New Urban Agenda defined for the next twenty years. 

Solution areas have been identified in the first round of WUC urban solutions prior to Habitat III: 

1. Financing tools and promotion of social capital: How to finance the City We Need. How communities are going to cope with their lives in a context of reduced resources. Solutions are precisely at the heart of communities and social networks ruled by reciprocity, trust, and cooperation, producing goods and services not mainly for themselves, but for a common good, an essential key to The City We Need. 
2. Empowerment in the urban space: Informal workers, slum dwellers, children and youth are prime examples of these groups, which if empowered to better access the city yield great returns to communities at unanticipated scales. Empowering people uses various vehicles from education to art. 
3. Optimization of urban access and flows: Access and flows of vehicles, utilities and data can be greatly optimized in order to improve overall quality of life and economic returns at several levels. Such solutions also have tremendous impacts on the use of energy, land and resources, directly addressing environment and climate issues. 
4. Sharing and pooling: In the same spirit, sharing and pooling data, bikes, cars, utilities, etc. seems to be the trend in order to cope with decreasing resources and to optimize usage of urban infrastructure and space. At the same time, such solutions reinforce social interaction while promoting economic returns. 
5. Environmental regenerative urban processes: These solutions help cities to harness their own regenerative capacity in order to address their increasingly damaging ecological footprints. Inefficient operations and wasteful linear systems should be turned into resource-efficient and circular systems 

Those solutions areas should inspire WUC partners to focus on these areas in dedicated Urban Thinkers Campuses in order to define action towards the achievement of The City We Need. 

The Urban Thinkers Campus should offer an open space for partners. It should convene representatives of different constituencies and partner organizations to debate around emerging practices that can positively contribute to a new urban paradigm in order to define their priorities. 

The Campus should not be presented as a formal conference where speakers make official presentations. The Urban Thinkers Campus is meant to be a place to share, learn and define the way forward through individual and joint commitments to implement the New Urban Agenda. The format of the Campus should flexible, based on open facilitated sessions, allowing a high level of interaction. All participants should have equal opportunities to voice their views, ideas, and commitment to support their vision towards action. 

The Urban Thinkers Campuses – Phase 2 (UTC 2.0) are meant to articulate the next steps of ACTION in order to implement the New Urban Agenda towards The City We Need: 

1. PRIORITY ACTIONS: Urban Thinkers should define their priority actions. They should agree on those in roundtables after a series of urban labs and urban thinkers’ sessions. 
2. COMMITMENTS: They should bring their individual organizations commitments at roundtables of negotiations after a series of partner group sessions. 
3. ACTION PLAN: They should then define an action plan combining all priority actions and commitments of all stakeholders presented in plenary. 
4. ROLE SETTING: They should agree on roles and responsibilities of stakeholders. 
5. ROAD MAP: The final outcome of each Campus should be an agreed implementable road map with key milestones presented in plenary. 
6. SHARING: The above should be shared publicly through all WUC outreach channels (website, social media, newsletter, emails and others). 

In the Paris Agreement (2015), cities and subnational authorities are explicitly invited to scale up efforts to reduce emissions and adapt to climate change. Climate commitments by cities and non-State actors could push countries to better achieve their emissions reduction goals under the Paris Agreement. In 2021, countries are meant to start implementing this agreement. The 2021 United Nations Climate Change Conference (COP26) to be held on 1-12 Nov 2021 in Glasgow will be a critical moment.

The United Nation’s Agenda for Sustainable Development, and Sustainable Development Goal 11 “to make cities inclusive, safe, resilient and sustainable” puts sustainable urbanization as one of the key priorities of the global agendas for development. It has been called the ‘docking station’ for all the other SDGs. The adoption of the new Urban Agenda by the United Nations in 2016 has seen national and local governments around the world embark on a transformative path towards making SDG11 a reality.

 "2021 must be the year of a great leap toward carbon neutrality. Every country, city, financial institution and company should adopt plans for transitioning to net zero emissions by 2050.” 

"We are all rightly focused on responding to the pandemic. But as we strive to overcome one crisis, we have an opening to address another," Guterres said. "The pandemic has shown that we can think big and act big in the face of an emergency. We have crucial decisions to make in the weeks and months ahead. Let's get it right." Antonio Guterres, 16 Nov 2020.