Local Governments, the key to the success of the Urban Agenda

The important international compromises that have been reached throughout this last decade have brought about a major shift in the urban policies of our cities. Since the adoption of the 2030 Agenda and the New Urban Agenda, we have become increasingly aware of the significant role played by local governments in reaching these objectives. We find ourselves immersed in a slow and constant process of global transformation, in which the population is concentrated mostly in the cities. Considering this, decision-makers in local governments must be able to rely on the necessary tools to ensure that we live in sustainable, inclusive, safe, and resilient cities, and promote participatory processes that allow citizens to identify with their city. The New Urban Agenda, adopted by the United Nations Conference on Housing and Sustainable Development, Habitat III, in Quito (2016), highlights that well-planned and well-managed urbanization can be a transformative force in accelerating the achievement of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). The Spanish Urban Agenda is an urban policy at the national level, developed to comply with Spain’s commitments in various international agreements: the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development, the New Urban Agenda of the United Nations, and the European Urban Agenda. It is a strategic framework without normative character that seeks to guide the decisions and policies that shape the territorial and the urban with a global, integrated, and long-term vision. It is also a policy lever in the Action Plan for the Implementation of 2030 Agenda in Spain, with the capacity to accelerate the implementation of the Sustainable Development Goals in all goals that have territorial and urban components, particularly SDG 11 on sustainable, inclusive, safe, and resilient cities. The Urban Agenda emerges within an international setting, its point of departure being a long tradition of towns and cities that rely on a compact, concentric, and multifunctional traditional model. Well-planned and well-equipped with elements and basic infrastructures that are publicly accessible to all citizens, this model guarantees social cohesion, the preservation of territory, and better behaviour in the face of the challenges inherent to climate change, without forgetting that we are immersed in the digital era and its new technologies. Taken into consideration by the Spanish Ministerial Council on February 22nd of 2019, the Spanish Urban Agenda will set the strategy and actions to be implemented until 2030, to make our towns and cities sites of friendly, welcoming, healthy and conscientious coexistence. Since then, local governments have worked to develop their own agendas, using the methodology offered by the Urban Agenda to achieve the objectives it formulates, with a vision of integrated and strategic work thatresponds to all of them, reinforcing the idea that sustainability is territorial and environmental, but also social and economic.