Local2030 Ksn Knowledge-Based Approaches to Housing and Urban Resilience

Housing lies at the heart of safe, resilient, and inclusive urban development. As cities and territories face growing pressures linked to climate stress, demographic change, environmental degradation, and institutional constraints, there is an urgent and increasing need for practical, locally grounded solutions that support more informed and forward-looking decision-making. The challenge is not only to generate knowledge, but to ensure that knowledge is translated into forms that are useful, actionable, and responsive to the realities of local governance. In this context, the Local2030 Knowledge and Scientific Network (KSN), established under the UN Local2030 Coalition and implemented in partnership with UN-Habitat and the Centro Studi di Politica Internazionale (CeSPI ETS), serves as a strategic link between academic research and urban and territorial decision-making. The KSN brings together researchers, policymakers, community leaders, and practitioners to catalyze knowledge exchange and co-create scalable, evidence-based solutions rooted in territorial realities. In doing so, it helps connect scientific expertise with operational needs on the ground, contributing to more effective and context-sensitive approaches to SDG localization. Anchored in the Road to Baku: “The Local Way” engagement strategy, this side event will position the KSN as an enabling mechanism for cities and territories seeking practical pathways to action on housing, resilience, and urban transformation. It will highlight how structured collaboration between academia and policymakers can generate actionable solutions, policy guidance, and implementable project concepts, while also contributing to broader global processes, including the WUF13 Call to Action. The side event, co-organized by the UN Local2030 Coalition, UN-Habitat and CeSPI ETS, will showcase how the KSN functions as a knowledge co-production and translation mechanism, enabling territories to access context-specific evidence, methodological tools, and interdisciplinary expertise. Through three selected cases, the event will demonstrate how research can be embedded into urban governance and territorial planning processes, in order to support more resilient and inclusive housing and urban development outcomes. In particular, the event will showcase the following: 1. Highlight KSN Innovation Labs as centers of excellence, illustrating how universities translate their research into territorial action that strengthens urban resilience and SDG localization. 2. Highlight the pilot country experiences of Tunisia and Jordan: in Kerkennah (Tunisia), where a Digital Twin based on Heritage Building Information Modelling (HBIM) enables data integration and informed decision-making on heritage conservation, adaptive reuse, and spatial planning in a climate-vulnerable island context; while in Irbid (Jordan), performance-based analysis of housing envelope configurations informs housing standards, improves thermal comfort, reduces energy demand, and strengthens urban resilience. By bringing together academic and municipal perspectives, the side event aims to provide a practical space for reflection on how these approaches are responding to operational needs and institutional realities. More broadly, it will underline the value of the KSN as a helpful platform for translating scientific knowledge into usable policy inputs and scalable approaches for inclusive, safe, and resilient housing and urban environments. Key objectives and expected outcomes 1) Integrating scientific evidence and policy-oriented tools into local housing and urban decision-making through the KSN, responding to concrete operational needs of local authorities and supporting more informed and evidence-based approaches to housing and urban resilience. 2) Strengthening municipal capacity through sustained collaboration between academia, local governments, and international partners, while highlighting existing partnerships and collaborative models that support locally grounded urban governance. 3) Mobilizing PhD students and early-career researchers as a resource for SDG localization and applied urban problem-solving, emphasizing their potential contribution to practical policy solutions, ongoing initiatives, and locally urban interventions. 4) Position housing and urban development as drivers of progress toward SDG 11, 13, and 17, demonstrating how evidence-informed decisions on the built environment create benefits related to safety, energy efficiency, climate resilience, and social well-being, while supporting a shift from reactive responses toward more anticipatory and sustainable urban planning. 5) Enabling knowledge exchange and scalability of housing and resilience approaches across cities, territories, and regions, while contributing to the potential replication of knowledge-based practices in different contexts.