Green Quality Standard

Most cities and towns cannot cope with the needs and demands of their current population and are unprepared for the unprecedented growth of the population that will occur during the next decades in terms of housing, infrastructure, services, institutional capacity, resources and policies. Unless the urban areas can absorb the growing population, the region will experience the urbanization of poverty. Urban poverty reduction is therefore an imperative for most governments in the region for many years to come. Cities and towns play an important role in social and economic development.

They are the engines of economic growth, the centres of social, cultural, spiritual and scientific advancement and the cradles of civilization. Being engines of economic growth, urban areas will feel the immediate impact of economic globalization. They will need to compete for investments in the global economy or perish as economic backwaters. With industry, urban transport and the domestic sector as the primary consumers of scarce natural resources and the primary polluters of the global environment, there will also be pressure on cities and towns to improve their urban environments and reduce their ecological footprints.

The second United Nations Conference on Human Settlements (Habitat II) held at Istanbul in 1996, recognized the urgent need to improve the quality of human settlements. It addressed two themes: Adequate Shelter for All, and Sustainable Human Settlements Development in an Urbanizing World.

Habitat II recognized that access to adequate shelter and basic services was essential for the physical, psychological, social and economic well-being of people. It also recognized that the sustainable development of human settlements required economic development, social development and environmental protection. However, cities and towns are not planned or designed on drawing boards or in municipal councils, but are the result of myriad decisions by political bodies, government agencies, private enterprises, civil society organizations, households and individual persons.

Although the approaches are not always successful, there is a need to share experience, to learn from good and bad practices and to replicate good practices, wherever possible. The challenges faced by urban areas are gigantic. Habitat II therefore concluded that the achievement of sustainable human settlements and the provision of adequate shelter and basic services for all require partnerships among countries and among all actors within countries, including public, private, voluntary and community-based organizations, the cooperative sector, non-governmental organizations and individuals. Partnerships can help to pool resources, share knowledge, contribute skills and capitalize on the comparative advantages of collective action.

The Habitat Agenda is a global call to action at all levels, but the improvement of the quality of human settlements is ultimately a local activity and all the more so as central governments are decentralizing many of their responsibilities for the development and management of human settlements to lower levels of government. As a consequence, there is a need to develop local Habitat Agendas through urban forums that bring together and commit all urban stakeholders.

There are two prerequisites for initiating an effective and inclusive process of decision-making: access to information and a platform for debate, discussion and interaction among interest groups in a city. In many cases, vital information for decision-making is not available or not accessible, because it is not routinely collected, or not synthesized and presented in a form easily understandable by laypersons. Sometimes information is available, but it is simply not released to the general public. Moreover, information is often fragmented, making it difficult to see relationships among different issues. Preparing state-of-the-city reports that describe prevailing conditions in cities or towns is a way of integrating all available information into a comprehensive picture and identifying information gaps and discrepancies.

The purpose of preparing state-of-the-city reports is not simply to collect information about the conditions in a city or town but, more importantly, to initiate and institutionalize dialogue, debate and partnerships among various urban actors at the local level. The reports should be presented at urban forums in which stakeholders can debate the findings of the reports, prioritize the problems and formulate a local Habitat Agenda, a plan of action to address the problems that involves all urban stakeholders. By its very nature, the organization of an urban forum is an open-ended undertaking. An urban forum may complement the work of the local government by creating an additional platform for discussion among groups interested in and committed to urban development. In this case, the outcomes of the forum’s discussions serve as an input into the deliberations of the local government council. The organization of an urban forum might help raise issues and establish partnerships among urban actors to solve problems not addressed by local government.

An urban forum can serve as a platform for discussion groups with the aim of increasing public awareness of important urban issues. It can serve as a platform for pressure groups aimed at persuading other urban actors to address important urban problems. It can also be a starting point for action by participating stakeholders to address important urban problems. The function of the urban forum depends to a large extent on the environment in which it operates and the capacity of participating stakeholders to follow up on the debate in the urban forum. Through the present publication, ESCAP reaffirms its commitment to the implementation of the Habitat Agenda at the local level. It aims to guide interested groups to develop a state-of-the-city report and a local Habitat Agenda. It starts with an overview of the goals and principles, commitments and actions described in the Agenda. It also contains guidelines on the organization of urban forums and the preparation of a state-of-the-city report.