Urban planners, elected officials, representatives of nonprofit organizations, and others came together in the historic metropolis of Cairo in late 2024 to confront the relentless pressures that global cities are facing, at the World Urban Forum 12 convened by the United Nations Human Settlements Programme (UN-Habitat). The theme of the summit was “It all starts at home.”

Growing populations, a continuing housing crisis, and climate change–triggered disasters including floods, droughts, and fires—as well as vast destruction associated with military conflict—have brought new intensity to efforts to support burgeoning urban areas across the globe, particularly in the developing world.

At the closing ceremony, UN-Habitat Executive Director Anaclaudia Rossbach, noting that two-thirds of the world’s population resides in urban areas, highlighted the pivotal role of local governments in shaping cities and human settlements. Rossbach, previously the director of the Latin America and the Caribbean program at the Lincoln Institute, said the conference set new records of engagement, with 24,000 participants from 182 countries.

“The World Urban Forum is a uniquely relevant event for those concerned about the quality and promise of human settlements large and small,” said Enrique R. Silva, chief program officer at the Lincoln Institute. “It’s an event that tackles the complex nature of urban issues by embracing a diversity of voices, techniques, and tools. For the Lincoln Institute, the World Urban Forum is a key space in which we can demonstrate how land and land policy can provide effective solutions to address housing, climate, and public health concerns, among other global, national, and local policy priorities.”

At the summit’s Dialogue 4: Localizing Finance and Financing Localization, Silva lauded local government efforts to boost own-source revenues, especially revenues that can be generated through the property tax or land value capture. “A local government’s capacity to leverage and manage own-source revenue not only strengthens its local finances, but also demonstrates to national and multilateral funders that it has the ability to plan, finance, and deliver projects,” he said. “This capacity can help local governments access larger sources of funding for much-needed projects.”

Representatives from the Lincoln Institute delegation participated in panels and training sessions focused on financing local development, climate mitigation and resilience, land value capture, and affordable housing. They also took part in an open house presented by the Center for Geospatial Solutions and a special Urban Library event featuring municipal leaders and the Lincoln Institute book Mayor’s Desk: 20 Conversations with Local Leaders Solving Global Problems. That event included the governor of Cairo, Ibrahim Saber Khalil, who will be the next local leader interviewed in the ongoing Mayor’s Desk series. Other municipal leaders who participated in the panel, Mayors and Innovators: Replicable Strategies for Local Political and Technological Change, included Manuel de Araujo, mayor of Quelimane, Mozambique; Kostas Bakoyannis, former mayor of Athens; and Marvin Rees, former mayor of Bristol, England.

The issue of climate change remains prominent in any consideration of global cities and their future, said Amy Cotter, director of urban sustainability at the Lincoln Institute.

“In this unparalleled global conversation about all things urban, the context of a changing climate is ever present,” she said. “City leaders are very aware of their dual roles—both agent and victim of climate change impacts—and eager for levers of change that they can control. I was impressed with their level of engagement in our sessions on land-based climate finance and on preparing for a potential climate-induced population influx, and their commitment to putting ideas and approaches into practice back home.”

At the Urban Planning & City Solutions for Climate Mobility panel, Cotter acknowledged “the increasing difficulty of people to remain in precarious places” and offered ways that communities anticipating a potential influx of climate change–induced relocation can plan and prepare for that future, drawing from the recent working paper “Insights for Receiving Communities in Planning Equitable and Positive Outcomes Under Climate Migration.”

The Lincoln Institute continued to expand the knowledge base and create new resources on the topic of land-based climate finance. Economist Cynthia Goytia, lead author of the recently published working paper “Examining Opportunities and Challenges for Implementing Land-Based Financing Instruments for Funding Climate Action: A Study of Land Markets and Flood Risk Pricing in Different Contexts,” explored the ways cities can recoup the costs of resilience through value capture, at the session Financing Strategies and Smart Solutions for Cities Worldwide.

Luis Quintanilla, program analyst at the Lincoln Institute, led a training workshop on value capture and participated in Financing Urban Infrastructure: Innovative Options to Attract Investors. In collaboration with the Cities Forward initiative, the session Overcoming the Project Implementation Gap to Address Urban Sustainability and Resilience revealed the opportunity and benefit of land value capture for climate action.

Housing inadequacy—affecting an estimated 2.8 billion people worldwide—was the weighty topic at Meeting the Moment: Innovations in Housing Supply to Address Inequality in Cities, where Darla Munroe, director of Research and Cross-Cutting Initiatives at the Lincoln Institute, discussed the affordability of manufactured homes, as well as zoning reform efforts in the US aimed at increasing housing supply.

The Lincoln Institute has been engaged in UN-Habitat’s World Urban Forum summits for nearly 20 years.

Anthony Flint is a senior fellow at the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy, host of the Land Matters podcast, and a contributing editor of Land Lines.

Lead image: Anthony Flint of the Lincoln Institute, center, meets with Cairo Governor Ibrahim Saber Khalil, left, at the World Urban Forum. Khalil will be the next local leader profiled in the ongoing Mayor’s Desk series. Credit: Lincoln Institute.

In the Ecuadorian city of Durán, more than 70 percent of the estimated 325,000 residents have no drinking water or sewage service. They must purchase water trucked in by tanker companies—a precarious, seemingly untenable situation that has persisted for almost 40 years. When a team of journalists set out to investigate the reasons for Durán’s inadequate water infrastructure—and uncovered some of the government obscuration and private-sector corruption behind it—they began to receive threats of violence.

The team persevered, however, and published a multimedia investigative series that describes in vivid detail how collusion between government actors and the private sector has restricted access to the basic service of drinking water for most of Durán’s population. This fall, the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy recognized the work of two journalists involved with the project—Leonardo Gómez Ponce and another whose name is being withheld due to ongoing threats—with the 2024 Lincoln Award (Premio Lincoln) for Urban Policy, Sustainable Development, and Climate Change Journalism. Both recipients are part of the Unidad de Investigación Tierra de Nadie (No Man’s Land Research Unit). The award, now in its third year, was presented as part of the prestigious 2024 Latin American Conference of Investigative Journalism (COLPIN), and recognizes the best land policy journalism in Latin America and the Caribbean.

Ponce and other Premio Lincoln winners joined a roundtable discussion, moderated by Lincoln Institute Senior Program Manager Laura Mullahy, on Day 3 of the annual COLPIN conference, held this year in Madrid. The four-day event was organized by the Lima, Peru–based Instituto Prensa y Sociedad (Press and Society Institute), or IPYS.

Journalists submitted 265 entries for the Premio Lincoln this year, Mullahy says—more than double the number received in each of the first two years—and the entries were all over the map, both literally (representing 63 cities in 22 countries) and topically. Water shortages, climate change, and housing were prevalent subjects, as were investigations on land conflicts, climate migration, informal settlements, and illegal or unjust land use.

Mullahy says the depth and tenacity of the reporting was inspiring. Some of the winning journalists had been pursuing stories for several years. “I get sort of emotional about these awards,” she says, “because these are such dedicated people.” Mullahy was also proud that two of the winners had participated in Lincoln Institute courses for Latin American journalists in the past, which were designed to introduce them to core concepts of land policy.

Below, find the winners of the 2024 Lincoln Award for Journalism on Urban Policy, Sustainable Development, and Climate Change, along with links to their work. (See the 2023 winners here.)

2024 Premio Lincoln Winners

First Prize: Leonardo Gómez Ponce and colleague for the series, “Durán, los hijos del tren y las mafias del agua” (“Durán: The Children of the Train and the Water Mafias”), a years-long investigation published by Ecuador’s Tierra de Nadie.

The online platform for this multi-part, data-rich investigative series opens with a real-time counter tallying the more than 38 years—every month, day, hour, second—that 70 percent of residents in the city of Durán, Ecuador, have gone without drinking water or functioning sewer systems.

“This is an example of how unscrupulous businesses can limit the planning and development of a city’s infrastructure,” Mullahy says. “The selection committee valued the investigative quality, the contribution of data and supporting documentation, and the clear demonstration that without infrastructure of basic services, populations remain in poverty and no progress is possible.”

Second prize: Alexánder Marín Correa, Juan Camilo Parra, Miguel Ángel Vivas, Camilo Tovar Puentes, María Angélica García Puerto, and Juan Camilo Beltrán, for “Escasez de agua en Bogotá: ¿Cómo llegamos a este punto?” (“Water Shortage in Bogotá: How Did We Get to This Point?”), published by El Espectador in Colombia.

Produced by a group of journalists from Colombian newspaper El Espectador, this article chronicles how a combination of historical, environmental, and management factors led to a health catastrophe in Bogotá.

The article recounts how Colombia’s capital city has experienced rapid growth and increased demand for water, all while deforestation and climate change have diminished water sources. The situation is aggravated by river pollution and the lack of adequate infrastructure. The article clearly shows that water management has been inefficient, leading to distribution problems and inequitable access. This context poses an urgent challenge to guarantee the sustainable supply of water to the people of Bogotá.

Third prize: Aramís Castro, for “Boom inmobiliario en la Amazonía del Perú agudiza la pérdida de bosques” (“Real Estate Boom in the Peruvian Amazon Exacerbates Forest Loss”), published by OjoPúblico in Peru.

Castro’s article analyzes how real estate speculation is contributing to deforestation in the Peruvian Amazon, demonstrating how the sale of rural land is transforming regions such as San Martín and Ucayali, where thousands of hectares of forests have already been lost.

Castro analyzed hundreds of social media advertisements and found that private real estate companies were promoting renderings of modern buildings in wooded, natural settings, luring buyers with slogans like, “The new Miami in the Peruvian jungle.” But many of the rustic lots lack even basic water or sewerage services, and often contribute to the degradation of the ecosystem. The research shows how the lack of regulation and control in the sale of land aggravates deforestation, biodiversity loss, and other environmental issues.

Honorable Mention 1: Lucía Viridiana Vergara García, Darío Ramírez, Isabel Mateos, Rodrigo Flores Esquinca, Alonso Esquinca Díaz, Erick Retana, Eduardo Mota, and Eduardo Buendía, for “Aquí no cabe un tren” (“There’s No Room for a Train Here”) and “La Sedena arrasó la selva para construir 6 hoteles del Tren Maya” (“Sedena Razed the Jungle to Build 6 Mayan Train Hotels”), produced by Mexicanos contra la Corrupción y la Impunidad in Mexico.

This article and accompanying podcast look at how the construction of the Mayan Train in Mexico—and the new hotels linked to this mega-project—could cause irreversible damage to the environment, contradicting arguments for developing the regions through which the train will pass. The work clearly and creatively explores the topic with rich testimonials, and raises a range of issues with the project, from the felling of trees and the lack of technical and scientific studies of its environmental impacts, to the effects of construction in protected archaeological areas and a biosphere declared a UNESCO World Heritage site in 2002.

Honorable Mention 2: Daniel Fonseca for “¿Dónde vamos a vivir? Datos, proyectos e intentos de solución al problema de vivienda en América Latina” (“Where Are We Going to Live? Data, Projects, and Attempted Solutions to the Housing Problem in Latin America”), published by Distintas Latitudes, Honduras.

This journalistic investigation, carried out for Distintas Latitudes by the seventh generation of the LATAM Network of Young Journalists, explores the housing crisis in Latin America from different angles. It highlights problems such as access to housing, the increase in inequality, and the lack of inclusive policies for vulnerable groups such as youth, women, and the LGBTI community.

The series examines the dynamics of unplanned urban growth and how governments have failed to adequately address the demand for decent housing—and seeks to shed light on current conditions and propose solutions to guarantee the right to adequate housing in the region.

Honorable Mention 3: Aitor Sáez for “Aguas revueltas: sequía y saqueo en México” (“Troubled Waters: Drought and Looting in Mexico”), published by ​​Pie de Página, Mexico

This investigative series describes the water crisis in 12 regions of Mexico. The report reflects the different conflicts related to the lack of water, which result from both the climate crisis and direct human intervention, especially through the coercion of organized crime.

Honorable Mention 4: Miguel Ángel Dobrich and Gabriel Farías, for “De la sequía a la inundación: el impacto sobre el trabajo en la zona costera de Uruguay, de Este a Oeste” (“From Drought to Flood: The Impact on Work in the Coastal Zone of Uruguay, from East to West”), published by Amenaza Roboto in Uruguay.

This article explores the impact of climate change on working conditions in different areas of Uruguay, from Valizas to Ciudad del Plata, describing how extreme weather affects artisanal fishermen, domestic workers, and other people who depend on vulnerable ecosystems. It also addresses inequality and flood risk in coastal communities. The research combines geospatial data and advanced visualization to show the impact of these changes.

Honorable Mention 5: Vinicius Sassine and Lalo de Almeida for “Cerco às aldeias” (“Siege of Villages”), published by Folha de São Paulo in Brazil.

This piece describes how mining companies, or garimpos, rob land, water, and health from the Mundurukus, Kayapós, Nambikwaras, and Yanomami–Indigenous groups of the Brazilian Amazon. In the areas where these mining companies operate, inhabitants suffer from illnesses due to contact with mercury, the toxic heavy metal used to separate gold from the ground. Children are diagnosed with cognitive delays, and adults with physical illnesses. However, the Brazilian government has no plans to put a stop to illegal mining.

Lead image: A truck brings water to Durán, Ecuador, where nearly 70 percent of residents have lived without drinking water for decades. A multiyear project investigating this crisis recently won a Lincoln Institute journalism award. Credit: Unidad de Investigación Tierra de Nadie.

Two new translations of the Lincoln Institute book Design with Nature Now are hitting international bookshelves this year, and with them, a pair of interactive exhibitions—one in Nanjing, China, and a second in Taipei, Taiwan—have brought the publication’s concepts and projects to life for thousands of attendees.

Design with Nature Now was published in 2019 by the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy and the University of Pennsylvania, commemorating the 50th anniversary of Ian L. McHarg’s landmark volume, Design with Nature. Published in 1969, that book helped redefine landscape architecture and introduced ecological planning principles aligned with the growing environmental movement. Edited by Penn faculty, Design with Nature Now reflects on McHarg’s enduring influence over half a century later and showcases a variety of visionary environmental design projects taking place around the world. They include a protected 2,000-mile Yellowstone to Yukon wildlife corridor, a 5,000-mile Great Green Wall of trees and shrubs being planted to combat desertification in Africa, and the transformation of what was once the world’s largest landfill into a 2,200-acre urban park and wetland habitat in New York City.

Recognizing that it would be easier for people to appreciate the enormity and scale of such massive projects when the accompanying photographs and maps were measured in feet as opposed to inches, a team at Penn—including coeditor Frederick “Fritz” Steiner, professor and dean of the Weitzman School of Design, and William Whitaker, architectural archives collections manager—curated a series of visually stunning exhibitions at the Weitzman School upon the book’s initial publication in 2019. With the work now being translated into both simplified and traditional Chinese (the former used predominantly in mainland China, the latter in Taiwan), Steiner found partners with Penn connections abroad who were eager to revive and reimagine those installations for new audiences.

The Taiwan Institute of Landscape Architects (TILA) agreed to host an exhibition in Taipei, where the mayor is a Penn Law School alumnus; Southeast University in Nanjing, China, offered to host as well. Southeast is “the oldest school of architecture in China, and it was founded by two Penn alums, so we have a very close relationship,” Steiner says.

The Nanjing exhibition opened first, running May 31 through July 31, while the Taipei installation was open from September 14 to October 12. The exhibitions drew “thousands and thousands of people,” says Steiner, who attended both openings.

“Both venues were amazing,”  Steiner says, and the settings enhanced the displays of maps and other materials related to the book: “The Nanjing exhibition was held in a kind of shopping plaza on a huge lake by the historic city wall—it’s a major subway stop and a park, a venue where a lot of people get married, so it was just swarming with people,” Steiner says. The Taipei exhibit was housed in a former tobacco factory “in the hippest cultural and arts center of the city,” he adds, at the Songshan Cultural and Creative Park.

Penn professor and Design with Nature Now coeditor Karen M’Closkey recently returned from a global landscape architecture conference that overlapped with the end of the exhibit in Taipei, and says the dynamic venue helped ensure that the exhibition was packed. “They’ve renovated all these buildings, there are small shops and bookstores,” she says. “It was busy with people the whole time, and on the pedestrian street between the buildings, there were always performances and people selling things. It was a very lively place.”

In Taipei alone, roughly 9,600 people attended the exhibition, says curator Matt Chu, deputy secretary general of the Taiwan Institute of Landscape Architects. The Taipei exhibition included guided tours, weekend lectures with Taiwanese government officials, and a two-day symposium as the installation came to a close in mid-October.

Over 600 attendees took one of the guided tours offered by TILA volunteers and adjunct professors, Chu says, each tour beginning with a deep introduction to ecological design projects and concepts in the auditorium. “Every tour was packed, and we were so thrilled by positive feedback from the audience,” Chu says.

Themes That Resonate

The 25 large-scale environmental design projects showcased in Design with Nature Now are organized into five major themes: Big Wilds, Rising Tides, Fresh Waters, Toxic Lands, and Urban Futures. The exhibits were likewise split into five thematic categories, but also included a section on McHarg himself, called The House We Live In, and a gallery of works by artist and landscape architect Laurel McSherry, created during her stint as a Fulbright Scholar in McHarg’s homeland of Scotland. In both Nanjing and Taipei, local government agencies augmented the exhibits by connecting the themes to their own environmental efforts around climate change and resilience.

Three of the thematic projects highlighted in Design with Nature Now are located in China—including a focus on Qianhai Water City in Shenzhen—but that’s hardly the only reason the book has found a welcome audience there.

“The importance of nature to Chinese culture is ancient, so I think there’s that historic connection,” Steiner says. “But also in a contemporary sense, it’s the biggest country in the world in terms of population, it’s become majority urban . . . so the issues of urbanization, loss of biodiversity, climate change—they’re not abstract. There’s a lot of interest politically, both in Taiwan and in the People’s Republic, in addressing these issues. I think the five big themes that we identified resonate very much.”

In addition to the larger-than-life reproductions of maps, photographs, and landscapes, the exhibits included 3D models and updated information on projects featured in the book and original exhibit.

In Taipei the exhibit included a three-dimensional model of the city. And one of Chu’s favorite installations in Taipei brought new clarity to a concept introduced in McHarg’s 1969 book. McHarg and his students had famously sliced up contoured landscapes, such as that of Staten Island, New York, into different layers—showing existing land uses alongside hand-drawn maps of the area’s physiography, water table, wildlife habitat, forest cover, and tidal inundation, among other ecological features—in an analog precursor to geographic information system (GIS) mapping.

“In the original exhibition in Philadelphia, they had those 18 Staten Island graphics on the wall,” Chu says. “But I kind of stacked them using transparent panels, so visitors can see all the different layers—the geology, the hydrology, the vegetation, all the layers—the way Ian McHarg explained how nature would influence culture and where development should go.”

Five years after the Penn exhibition, Chu was also able to display updated photos from the landscape architecture firm Field Operations, which has completed early phases of two major projects featured in Design with Nature Now: Freshkills Park in New York, which was once the largest landfill in the world, and Qianhai Water City in Shenzhen. “So it’s kind of a comparison with five years ago, when they were only in the planning phase,” Chu says. “They’ve got North Park, Phase One built in Freshkills Park, and in Shenzhen they got Guiwan Park built. And you can see the process, how it’s come from the planning phase, to design, to building it, and see how designing with nature really came true.”

The exhibits also included video, notes Steiner, with displays including a snippet from a late-1960s McHarg documentary; a film by McSherry that synced the waxing spring daylight hours of Glasgow with cinematic scenes in real time; and previously recorded live-cam footage of wildlife in the Yellowstone to Yukon corridor using an underpass to cross beneath a busy road. “Kids would all be huddled around watching the animals go through the underpass,” says Steiner, who notes that the curiosity went both ways, as bears, coyotes, and other animals came up to inspect the camera at close range.

The Nanjing and Taipei exhibits were such a success that other organizations are already inquiring about hosting the exhibits next year. Steiner says the Nanjing exhibit is slated to move to Shanghai next summer, while in Taiwan, Chu says, “So far we have the Taoyuan City Library and Kaohsiung National Science and Technology Museum expressing their willingness to exhibit next year,” as well as interest from Taiwan’s Forestry and Nature Conservation Agency.

Chu said the exhibition helped raise the visibility of the landscape architecture profession locally. “Even though Ian McHarg actually came to Taiwan about 40 years ago, to help Taiwan establish its National Parks system, people in Taiwan still associate the profession more with horticulture or gardening,” Chu says. “So this exhibition really opened their eyes [to the idea] that landscape architects can help with things like climate change and biodiversity loss using large-scale planning and design.”

Jon Gorey is a staff writer at the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy.

Lead image: Visitors explore the Design with Nature Now exhibit in Taipei. Credit: Matt Chu.