Brief Report from the World Urban Forum
The seminal conference in Kuala Lumpur brought together 25,000 people from around the world to focus on achieving “cities for all”
Several members of the Future of Places team gathered at the World Urban Forum in Kuala Lumpur to discuss implementation of the New Urban Agenda. That document, focusing on how to create better quality cities, was developed at the Habitat III conference in Quito, Ecuador in October 2016 ,and later adopted by consensus by all 193 member states of the United Nations.
An introductory video from Kyle Farrell and Michael Mehaffy of the Centre:
The Future of Places played a key role in developing aspects of the New Urban Agenda, particularly its focus on “well- connected and well-distributed networks” of public space, as a key framework for sustainable urbanization. Over four years, the forum gathered some 1,500 researchers, practitioners, government officials, NGOs and citizens from 700 organizations in over 200 cities and over 100 countries.
Now the attention is on implementation, and the Centre for the Future of Places, a new research hub, will link with other hubs internationally to develop platforms of knowledge-sharing,
We asked Eugenie Birch, former chair of the World Urban Campaign and a key partner in the General Assembly of Partners, how she saw the role of the Centre for the Future of Places in the work ahead: