Planning for a New Urban Agenda

The Global Planners Network is an international consortium of planning institutes including the Royal Town Planning Institute, Commonwealth Association of Planners, International Society of City and Regional Planners, European Council of Spatial Planners, and American Planning Association among others. The event will explore the future of urban planning based on the UN New Urban Agenda (NUA). The event will take place in the context set by the event held by GPN at COP26 in Glasgow (Scotland) and chaired by the UN Habitat Executive Director which showed how planners and planning system across the world are tackling climate change and working to achieve net zero.

The New Urban Agenda will act as a jumping off point for discussions. It will also act as a way to stimulate delegate interactions and thinking and learning to work collectively together on future policy recommendations. We will circulate an annotated version of the NUA produced by ISOCARP which contains the information especially central to city and regional planners; and extends the effectiveness and reach of NUA and our shared objectives for sustainable development and climate justice. We will then focus on what has happened since 2016, the immediate issues facing planners such as climate action and mega-regional planning, and future policy recommendations for UN Habitat.

The session will emphasise the issues which are relevant for all planners everywhere: planning for and with the people, thus focusing on new forms of participatory planning post-pandemic. In doing so we will be informed by recent thinking such as the RTPI’s Urban Plannng After Covid and Urbanisation (October 2021), Displacement and Urban Planning (September 2021), an especially important theme in Europe at present.

The first part of the sesson (20 mins) will be introduced by 5 keynote speakers from the Commonweath Association of Planners and ISOCARP with short speeches of around 3 minutes each. This will be followed by 50 mins of facilitated roundtables to discuss and debate the above topics, with the intention that the involvement of the audience will producing important feedback which can be used for developing policy recommendations. Beyond our key speakers we will invite a wider group of urban planners from across our network to enable these discussions, drawing on representatives from a wider group of our member organisations. This will enable for tables to be hosted in Spanish, French and Polish where this would be helpful to WUF delegates. The event will close (20 mins) with feed back from individual tables into the main session, setting out the outlines of how urban planning should be operating from now on, at the mid point of the period between Habitat III and the end of the SDG period in 2030.