Housing the SDGs: city-led solutions through SDG Cities

The global housing crisis represents a structural challenge to the achievement of the 2030 Agenda and the New Urban Agenda, requiring integrated, inclusive and place-based responses. Cities and local governments play a fundamental role in the implementation of global commitments, translating international frameworks into public policies, programmes and investments that generate measurable and equitable impact at the local level. Adequate housing is a core enabler of sustainable urban development and a critical entry point for advancing the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), particularly SDGs 1, 10, 11 and 17. SDG Cities works to harness the solutions and innovations developed by cities, aiming to contribute to the process of the Local2030 Coalition. SDG Cities offers a holistic, flexible and modular approach aimed at making things easy for cities – simplifying complex local development processes, fostering multilevel and multistakeholder cooperation to accelerate their path to prosperity. The SDG Cities Global Community has emerged as a dynamic space for cities to connect, exchange experiences, and share context-specific practices. This event aims to strengthen and expand this Community, while serving as a steppingstone towards the 2026 SDG Cities Global Conference – reinforcing collaboration, scaling locally led solutions, and accelerating collective action. This session will provide a platform for cities to demonstrate how SDG localization is a critical approach for addressing today’s interconnected challenges, with adequate housing as a central priority for advancing the global development agendas and sustainable urban futures. It will explore what cities are doing in practice, showcasing the policies, programmes, and investments being implemented, the measurable outcomes they are delivering, and how these experiences are shaping future plans and priorities. Organized within the SDG Cities initiative, this side event will present the Mafra Model as a good practice for SDG localization in housing policy, aligned with UN-Habitat’s mandate to promote inclusive, safe, resilient and sustainable cities. The model illustrates how housing can be positioned as a strategic driver of territorial cohesion, economic inclusion and improved quality of life. Through a coherent framework combining strategic vision, multi-level governance, inter-institutional coordination, multi-stakeholder engagement, integrated planning instruments and data-driven monitoring, the session will demonstrate how local governments can address structural housing challenges while mobilizing sustainable and scalable investment solutions, including private capital aligned with the SDGs.