The Next UN Conference on Urban Development Will Be Held in Quito, Ecuador

Quito will host the next UN Habitat conference.

Quito’s population has exploded from 200,000 in 1950 to 1.4 million in 2000. (Photo by Ana Guzzo on Flickr)

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The 2016 UN Conference on Housing and Sustainable Urban Development — more commonly known as Habitat III — will be held in Quito, Ecuador’s capital city. This decision will make Latin America the host of three out of the last four biennial UN-Habitat gatherings as it comes on the heels of a successful World Urban Forum (WUF) earlier this year and the fifth WUF, held four years ago in Rio de Janeiro.

The UN hosts an organization-wide conference on housing and urban development every 20 years. In 1976, the first Habitat Convention took place in Vancouver, resulting in the Vancouver Declaration that gave birth to UN-Habitat as an agency within the United Nations. Twenty years later, Habitat II convened in Istanbul. Its outcome was the Habitat Agenda, which has guided global urban policy for nearly two decades with its mandate “to endorse the universal goals of ensuring adequate shelter for all and making human settlements safer, healthier and more livable, equitable, sustainable and productive.”

In an exclusive interview for Next City, Joan Clos, UN-Habitat executive director and secretary general of Habitat III, indicated that climate change and the role of cities in sustainable development will be on the top of the agenda for the eventual framework to arise from Quito.

“Habitat III is going to be the first implementation conference after COP-21 in Paris,” Clos said. “In that sense, it’s at the right place in the calendar because the role of local authorities and urbanization is crucial in implementation of any climate change strategy. Cities are more or less responsible for something like 70 percent of greenhouse gas emissions.” According to a 2012 MIT study, Quito is a global leader in climate adaptation planning.

Habitat III will also take place after the adoption of the Post-2015 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), a replacement for the soon-to-be outdated Millennium Development Goals. Urbanists worldwide are campaigning for an urban-focused SDG, which Clos believes is likely. “The big question has becomes how does urbanization increase the chances for sustainable development because there’s a growing consensus that urbanization is a tool that accelerates economic growth,” he said, adding, “At the beginning of the 21st century, we cannot talk of development without taking about proper urbanization.”

The host country, meanwhile, also garnered praise from Clos even if U.S. officials were reportedly less than pleased, as President Rafael Correa’s left-leaning government has not been friendly to Washington. “Ecuador has a very strong commitment to urbanization,” Clos said. “The President has clearly stated on several occasions that the strategy for improving the quality of life of Ecuadorians goes through improving their housing quality and generally the quality of life of the villages, little towns, middle-sized towns and cities.”

The Ecuadorian government is enthusiastic about having won the bid, which was uncontested. Earlier this week, Minister of Urban Development and Housing Diego Aulestia told local press, “Habitat III is the most important conference Quito has ever hosted” because “the future and the guidelines of the new global urban agenda” will be defined. “In 2016, Quito will be in the eyes of the whole world,” he affirmed.

The Ecuadorian capital is home to 1.6 million people, including a Quechua-speaking minority. It is the highest-elevation official capital city in the world, nestled in the Andes at 9,350 feet above sea level in an area prone to earthquakes and ringed by active volcanoes. Although the equator runs through the city (Ecuador means equator in Spanish), it has a highland climate that keeps daytime temperature moderate, albeit with strong solar rays. Quito’s name is derived from the Quitus, a Pre-Columbian indigenous group that founded the city, which was conquered by the Spanish in 1533. UNESCO considers it the best-preserved historic city center in Latin America, and it was named along with Krakow, Poland as the first World Heritage City in 1978.

At the same time, Quito has been beset by much more contemporary challenges. From 1950 to 2000, the city grew from 200,000 to 1.4 million due to massive rural-to-urban migration that created informal settlements known as barrios perifericos along the urban periphery. The 1993 Law of the Metropolitan District of Quito decentralized administrative power to allow for more efficient land tenure titling and other negotiations.

“Quito is a city in the midst of transformation,” says Jonathan Viera, third secretary of the Mission of Ecuador to the United Nations. “Its Metropolitan Development Plan is oriented toward making Quito a ‘quality of life city’ in order to build a future of social equality and territorial equity.” He cites innovations in urban transport — Quito has BRT and bike-share, with subway under construction — management of public space, land tenure regularization, risk management, and environmental resilience as hot-button issues that will give visitors to Quito plenty to ponder outside the conference halls as they take a break from one atmosphere of rarefied air and emerge into another.

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Gregory Scruggs is a Seattle-based independent journalist who writes about solutions for cities. He has covered major international forums on urbanization, climate change, and sustainable development where he has interviewed dozens of mayors and high-ranking officials in order to tell powerful stories about humanity’s urban future. He has reported at street level from more than two dozen countries on solutions to hot-button issues facing cities, from housing to transportation to civic engagement to social equity. In 2017, he won a United Nations Correspondents Association award for his coverage of global urbanization and the UN’s Habitat III summit on the future of cities. He is a member of the American Institute of Certified Planners.

Tags: resilient citiesclimate changesustainable citieshabitat iiiun-habitat

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