Time to Walk the Talk - Forefronting Local Action towards Urban Equality

For decades, urban public policies around the world have held as purported key objectives reducing inequalities and guaranteeing inclusion. Despite this, important gaps persist, taking on, in places, a systemic character. Yet tackling such gaps is generally understood as critical for addressing the many overlapping crises facing our contemporary world, and for defining sustainable and equitable urban futures for all.
Acknowledging the need to accelerate the articulated implementation of the SDGs to advance urban and territorial equality, this networking event brings to the fore the critical role of Local and Regional Governments (LRGs) and Organised Civil Society in this endeavour. The event draws on the UCLG (United Cities and Local Governments) GOLD (Global Observatory on Local Democracy and Decentralization) VI Report, ‘Pathways to Urban and Territorial Equality: Addressing inequalities through local transformation strategies’, to propose concrete areas for co-production between these key urban development actors. Such areas of collective action, we argue, are critical cogs in the current policy and political mobilisations towards the 2025 World Social Development Summit.
Specifically, the event proposes to present and unpack the six pathways to achieve equality identified in the GOLD VI report, i.e. Commoning, Caring, Connecting, Renaturing, Prospering and Democratising. Based on an extensive process of knowledge co-production and evidence gathering across LRGs, Civil Society Organisations (CSOs), the private sector and academic institutions, these pathways articulate six inter-related trajectories of change, capable of supporting decision-making processes, policies, and programmatic actions that actively seek to improve urban and territorial equality. Together, they advance a radical vision and concrete strategies to safeguard the future of people and the planet through better governance.
The event will kick off with a round of inputs from six panellists presenting each of the aforementioned pathways. Panellists will mirror the variety of actors involved in the development of the GOLD VI report – representing academic and knowledge institutions, CSOs, as well as LRGs - and will develop their argumentation with attention to geographic and stakeholder inclusivity. The second part of the event will invite participants into the discussion to help refine advocacy pathways from the report’s key findings to articulated mobilisations around the 2025 World Social Development Summit. The networking event will be chaired by UCLG which played a lead coordinating role in developing the GOLD VI report, alongside the Bartlett Development Planning Unit (DPU) at University College London (UCL).
The event is co-organised by the DPU, UCLG and Habitat International Coalition, a multi-actor coalition committed to grounding SDG advocacy in evidence-based research that demonstrates the key role of local actions in advancing urban and territorial equality.