Unlocking secondary cities' transformative power to implement sustainable urban development

This Network Event focuses on the planning, management, finance and development of secondary cities. Secondary cities will be the engine of rapid urbanization in the world, and especially in the Global South for the decades to come. In order to absorb and respond adequately to the rising pressure on land and increasing demand for housing, infrastructure, jobs and social services, these cities need to have an established governance and territorial planning, urban management systems and qualified human resources. With their own platform, secondary cities can also provide “city management as a service”, thereby helping the economic growth of surrounding cities and contributing to the sustainable development of an entire region. Systemic urban management creates value in future cities because it builds an environment to optimize investments and generate new revenues for city stakeholders. It is therefore essential to support local governments to mobilize own source revenues through enhanced productivity, planning and economic growth.

THE GUIDING QUESTIONS TO THE DISCUSSION ARE:
What kind of scale and size of cities are we dealing with? Do we have the conditions to guide urbanization and the urban expansion of secondary cities? What policies and strategies are effective in strengthening the role of secondary cities in the wider economy and national development context?

A global assessment of secondary cities development reveals weaknesses in their current planning, administration and in their economy that can adversely affect their ability to manage their expansion.

In addition, there is a definition challenge to identifying secondary cities across regions. Secondary cities are largely defined by their size of population and urbanized area, function in the region and economic importance.

Globally, there are more than 2,400 cities with populations between 150,000 and 5 million, which could be identified as secondary cities. This Network Event will give us the platform to bring about this important discussion on secondary cities, supported by concrete examples from our experts’ practice. It will further unfold challenges related to the demographic size, the scope and scale of local economies, the functions that they perform in the broad development context, the planning and management instruments at stake, and the policy and instrumental gaps, which practitioners and policymakers have to fill in in order to scale up secondary cities’ transformative power. The Network Event will also highlight the type of realities on the ground  and the preliminary findings of the EU sponsored project "The role and functions of secondary cities in the wider development picture" being carried out by Acciona Engenieria in Burkina Faso, Republic of Congo and Uganda. Some of the critical issues one needs to consider are being unfolded by the project such as the flows of goods, information, innovation capacity, system management, planning and the administration of the urban core but also its inter-linkages with the rural environment of the broader territory where these cities are located.