Housing the World: A World Urban Forum Recap with Anacláudia Rossbach

Transcript

[00:00:04] Anthony Flint: Welcome to Episode 4 of Season 7 of the Land Matters podcast. I’m your host, Anthony Flint. On this show, we’re going to zoom out for a truly global perspective on cities where nearly two-thirds of the planet’s population reside—technically about 55 percent or 4 billion people as of now, but projected to be 68 percent by 2050. However you look at it, that’s a lot of people needing food, water, shelter, community, and economic opportunity.

Our guest is Anacláudia Rossbach, Executive Director of UN-Habitat, the United Nations agency that runs the World Urban Forum. That’s the biennial global conference on sustainable urbanization, bringing together leaders from all levels of government, urban planners, and nonprofit organizations to address the really big issues facing these cities, and in many cases, huge metropolitan areas.

The World Urban Forum was established in 2001, so it’s a quarter-century-old tradition that’s right alongside the World Economic Forum or the COP, Conference of Parties climate summits. The last World Urban Forum, World Urban Forum 13, was held in May in Baku, Azerbaijan. We’re catching up with Anacláudia to get a recap and understand what the most pressing challenges are, and of course, the collaboration that’s going on to find solutions.

We’re joined by my colleague Enrique Silva, Chief Program Officer at the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy, and a veteran of many a World Urban Forum. He’s been engaged, among other things, on the role civil society has to play in supporting this rapidly urbanizing planet of ours. Anacláudia, I know it’s been a whirlwind. That may well be a permanent condition for you, but we really appreciate you making time to join the conversation on Land Matters.

[00:02:01] Anacláudia Rossbach: For sure, Anthony. Thank you so much. I’m here because land matters.

[00:02:05] Anthony Flint: The perfect guest! Let’s step back, and if you could provide an overview of World Urban Forum 13 and where it sits, in your view, in the pantheon of these gatherings, and then maybe a little bit about the venue, Baku, and how that was chosen. Tell us about World Urban Forum 13.

[00:02:27] Anacláudia Rossbach: First of all, you mentioned it as being approved by the General Assembly, actually, of the United Nations in 2001, to be a mechanism to engage with stakeholders. It is the primary space that we have at UN-Habitat to liaise with the civil society, with the academia, with local and regional governments, and also even the private sector. This, in Baku, was the 13th edition, and it was record-breaking at many levels.

Perhaps the first is in terms of attendance. It took place at the Olympic Stadium in Baku, which also hosted COP29 back in 2024. We had 58,000 people on the ground with badges. With this number, I think it became the largest UN conference because it was even bigger than the COP. In terms of the broader context, what role it played in terms of really generating change on the ground, because this is what we want at the end of the day, this edition was very strategic because it happened just a couple of months before we meet in New York in July to review SDG 11 and to review the new urban agenda after 10 years.

The new urban agenda is our main document that guides our work. It was endorsed by member states in Quito, Ecuador, in 2016 at the Habitat III conference.

[00:03:53] Anthony Flint: Just let me interject to explain the SDG 11. That’s the Sustainable Development Goal.

[00:03:59] Anacláudia Rossbach: Yes, the sustainable development goals that frame what we call the 2030 agenda. As the name says, 2030 is just around the corner. We have literally four years until the end of this agenda. The United Nations committed to address these sustainable development goals that are related to several aspects of the world we live in, climate being one, but education, health, employment, gender, equality. The SDG 11 is the one that is dedicated to cities and communities. It has to do with housing, informal settlements, land consumption is one aspect, planning, participatory planning, basic services, urban mobility.

What we discussed at the World Urban Forum [is] informing us in this process of going to New York and the assessment of where we are, and to share with member states. The other piece is the new urban agenda that I mentioned before. We are looking at what happened in the last 10 years and what is going to happen in the next 10 years.

One critical aspect of the New Urban Agenda, when it was conceived, was housing. Housing was supposed to be at the center of the New Urban Agenda. Effectively, we are living a global housing crisis. This is why the World Urban Forum brought housing as central theme. Baku was a critical space for us to reflect, to have technical and political discussions on the progress of the new urban agenda, to bring all that to the meeting in New York in July.

[00:05:38] Anthony Flint: Now, I want to ask you more about housing. That was a big theme. I know it’s difficult to summarize, but the declaration on housing, tell us about that, and this re-emphasized focus on housing and basic shelter.

[00:05:53] Anacláudia Rossbach: The Baku call to action is a call to action, as the name says, by stakeholders only. There was no engagement by member states. Stakeholders met, the civil society, the CBOs, the CSOs, the academia, and so on, the different groups, youth, women, persons with disabilities, aging, indigenous. They all met there. The result of their conversations is the Baku call to action, which is a document that is also being brought to New York to inform member states. We need to deal with the housing crisis. It is global.

Informal settlements has been a prevalent form of living, but it is now almost a humanitarian issue because we are stagnated and we might be at the risk of expanding. We have to have a holistic view of the city. We have to go back to the new urban agenda, bring the principles of the new urban agenda of participatory governance, comprehensive urban planning, recognizing that land is fundamental, that land has a social and ecological function, but we need to make sure that people are at the center.

When saying people, it’s people having access to the basics, to water, to electricity, to waste management, integrated to the city, and a roof over their heads. These communities are the frontline, the frontline of climate change, but also human rights violations, evictions, and other forms of issues that are affecting people residing in the most vulnerable spaces in our cities.

[00:07:25] Anthony Flint: Housing is a big issue in the US; affordability, a big issue. It sounds like there’s a more fundamental question of how people can find safe shelter all around the world in these growing cities.

[00:07:40] Anacláudia Rossbach: It is a huge, huge task, and you’re right. Affordability became a global issue. What has been a prevalent feature of the Global South, always the gap between what people’s income and the cost of the house has been always really big. One of the reasons why we have the prevalence of informal settlements because people need to live somewhere, and if they cannot buy a house in the market, if the government doesn’t have money to provide the needed subsidies to cover this gap, they occupy.

Now, it’s an issue in North America. You mentioned the US. It’s an issue in Europe. In Europe, for example, for the first time, the European Union has a dedicated commissioner to housing. For the first time, they have a housing plan. I think the first time after the Marshall Plan, which was actually focused on housing, they have a housing plan for the continent because perhaps there is supply, but there is a mismatch of supply because people cannot access the units at the market, or there is a limitation of supply because the houses have been taken by, for example, tourists in some of the cities that are affected by high levels of tourism, or cities or countries that are attracting retired population, and things like that.

Bottom line, young people, families, they don’t have today the money to buy or to rent a house. In most of the countries, elderly, sometimes they cannot stay where they are, and so they lose their houses. These are all factors that are limiting affordability everywhere.

[00:09:10] Anthony Flint: We will share the declaration about housing in the show notes. I’d like to turn this question over to Enrique with a little commentary. Enrique, if you don’t mind, as a preamble, because you’ve been such a veteran of the World Urban Forum, we noticed that land and land policy is one of the three pillars in the current strategic plan, and we all want to learn more about that. Enrique, may I turn it over to you?

[00:09:37] Enrique Silva: Sure. Thanks so much. First, I want to say how much I’m enjoying, and I appreciate sharing the space with my friend and colleague, Anacláudia, and also to congratulate her and her colleagues for what was, as she noted, an outstanding forum a couple of weeks ago, by all measures. I also want to take a note on the World Urban Forum as a space. I think it’s understated, but the UN-Habitat in creating and offering the World Urban Forum creates probably the singular space for all of us that are interested, care about cities and human settlements to gather and to talk.

Without that space, it’s really hard to think about how we could create a community, even a multidisciplinary, multi-vision on what it means to take care of and advocate for cities. It’s great to see colleagues. It’s great to meet new colleagues and to share the accomplishments that we’re making, but also come together to understand what the challenges are. I also want to congratulate UN-Habitat and Anacláudia’s leadership for not just the forum, but what was behind the forum, as I understand it, is a strategic plan for UN-Habitat that also has housing in the center. That plan offers a systematic way to approach this huge task that we were just talking about.

That, in and of itself, is a contribution. Within that, and now to your question, one of the things that I appreciate and that is innovative about the focus on housing that UN-Habitat is proposing is that it really steps away from housing as pure shelter. It looks at the ecosystem behind housing. It looks at housing from a socioeconomic, cultural perspective. With regards to land, it acknowledges very clearly, and this is important, even though for us in the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy, it’s our daily bread, but out in the world, outside of our offices, we do not connect enough the relationship between land, land use, land policy, and housing as shelter, housing as an economic asset, housing as a dignified vehicle for improving our socioeconomic mobility.

That is something that needs to be really celebrated. There’s a space. UN-Habitat, through its plan, through the forum, has given a structured space to understand all of the dimensions of land. In particular, and I think one of the things that we need to look at it in terms of a huge task, is clearly stating that a huge portion of the cost of housing, whether it’s a mansion or a shack, is land, the cost of land.

That forces us to look at what drives the cost of land and how the cost of land affects the availability of land for anyone to put a house on that piece of land. That, for us, is something very important. We are strong allies with UN-Habitat to keep on hammering that message, but also doing the research and demonstrating how the relationship works, and why we need to develop clear strategies, multiple-level strategies, to link the way that we administer and allocate land and how that affects what we could offer as housing.

I’m sure we’re going to talk about informal settlements, but that relationship between land policy, the quality of land, and the availability of land is at the root of the proliferation of informal settlements. My take, and I think the take of many colleagues, if that’s at the root of informal settlements, the solutions to informal settlements also have to go through addressing the role of land.

[00:12:59] Anthony Flint: Anacláudia, do you have anything to add on the matter of land?

[00:13:03] Anacláudia Rossbach: I think in that sense, this … was also unprecedented because we really were able to connect our strategic plan, which has a very sharp focus. It’s access to housing, to land, basic services, the transformation of informal settlements, to the whole structure of the discussion. Of course, we will help the people attending, our people, our staff, but all the partners that attended to come back home with more concrete ideas, insights, and inspiration, and ideas, all that, but concrete examples on how to go back and to implement.

Enrique is right. Land is at the core. The price of land has been impacting all these effects in the market that is generating pressure on affordability. We have to look at that, at the root causes. I’m glad we are partnering with Lincoln to do that. What are the actions? What are the land policies? What are the mechanisms that you can apply at the local level? What are the laws that you need at the national level to help us overcome this challenge?

Also, if we look from the climate lens, which is one of the areas of impact of our strategic plan, and spoiler alert, we are still finalizing our SDG 11 report, but we’re still growing more in territory than in population. Urban sprawl is still bigger than what perhaps we need. This has a strong impact in the environment, in terms of the natural ecosystems, the natural environment, in terms of the infrastructure needed when we sprawl, and the footprint in terms of emissions.

I think at the World Urban Forum, the Baku call to action, we were able to bring all these different perspectives, the economic perspectives of markets, how they’re working, not working, how it’s putting pressure on affordability, how housing is so important for the SDGs, for the socioeconomic challenge that we have, but also the climate perspective. Land is a central aspect of that.

[00:15:00] Anthony Flint: Just following up on land and housing and the issue of informal settlement, you mentioned that we’re still expanding in terms of land at a rate that is a little bit at odds with the actual population, but there’s this sort of spreading out of informal settlement. What is the current view on what to do about that to try to prevent it or curtail it or to work with it in situ that there are improvements that can be made to improve the quality of life in these expanding informal settlements?

[00:15:37] Anacláudia Rossbach: First of all, recognize that they are there because we are talking about 1 billion people. We are at the moment at a crossroad. We have been able to stabilize informality growth in certain regions. However, we have Africa and Southeast Asia receiving about 2 billion people in the next couple of decades, and Latin America also in a crossroads after COVID. In the Global South, we might be at risk of expanding informality if we don’t take action. This is the big picture.

Also, in the Global North, informality also popping up and being recognized. I saw that in Europe. You see vulnerable communities, you have refugees, you have overcrowding. The point is let’s take a picture and let’s recognize they are there, and then having active policies to address that. Understanding that they have been the only option these people found when they moved to a certain city, to a certain metropolitan area.

As I said, they wouldn’t have the money to go to the markets and to a real estate agent and buy a house. The governments wouldn’t have programs that would reach the whole of the population. They go, they find a job, they have aspirations, they go to cities, and they don’t have a place to live. They occupy environmentally protected areas. Sometimes they occupy public land that has been empty or even private land that has been empty.

This is what I mean in terms of recognizing the social function of the land. Many countries, especially in Latin America, they have embedded that in their national legislation. Embedding in the legal regulatory framework that we accept slums are there, informal settlements are there, and the people have the right to stay there and to access services.

Then, of course, from that, embedding in the city planning, from that, making sure that public investments flow into these areas and can generate transformation. Transformation in terms of looking at densities, opening up pathways, roads, looking at drainage solutions, but also looking at public spaces, at green coverage, access to social, to leisure, to cultural amenities, and make sure that these areas are connected up to the city. Embedding in urban planning, embedding in the national development strategies, these are all strategies that we recommend from UN-Habitat.

[00:18:04] Anthony Flint: Enrique, you’ve been tracking this incredibly vast issue of informal settlement for many years. Where do you see things stand at this moment in terms of what most people would say are slums, shantytowns, informal settlement?

[00:18:20] Enrique Silva: I’m glad we’re touching on this subject. It’s one of the things that I appreciated about coming to work at the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy, in particular, its program in Latin America, which, in many ways, was established a little over 30 years ago to understand the relationship between land policy, land markets, and the proliferation of informal settlements or slums, as some call it.

The argument that we’ve developed over that period is to stop looking at informality as merely an issue of poverty and household low income or resources, and to look at it as fundamentally a failure in local governments or local markets to provide land that is of a quality sufficient enough to sustain everyone’s household shelter needs with dignity. That failure manifests itself in governments for markets not investing in infrastructure, water, electricity, or preparing land that’s close to job markets.

Those are land policy issues and decisions that are both public, also market-driven. For us, land policy tries to intermediate public decisions with market decisions. There, our largest, biggest argument is if you want to prevent informal settlements, the sheltering of people in places that are not recognized by law, talk about climate change, are in place because they’re not recognized by law, in ecologically vulnerable or susceptible places. If you want to prevent those, invest in what we call servicing land, which is ensuring that either the public sector or the market conditions land so that people can have housing.

Do it enough, in the quantity enough, it makes the purchase of the land accessible to more income levels. That’s to prevent it. We still argue that the best way, and as Anacláudia was saying, we have a window of opportunity here to prevent additional informal settlement. A strategy for that—it’s not the only one—a strategy for that is to look at how we can allocate and create service land or offer service lands at an affordable price so that people can buy and settle them into it.

As Anacláudia rightfully says, we have to also, first and foremost, recognize what’s already there because of the failures of the past, and we need to address those. There is a land policy component to regularizing informal settlements. Those tend to be, though, costly, much more complicated because you’re dealing with people’s homes that are already established, communities that have built community and developed extremely healthy social, economic ties.

There are ways to do that. We offer land policy and land-based financing opportunities to finance the regularization of some of these informal settlements. For us, in terms of how to tackle the informal sector, informal housing, it’s everything above. All options are on the table. It’s not just preventative. You have to do both. It’s not just about paying for upgrading, but it’s also looking at the different models to secure tenure of the households there. If and when that land is improved upon, those improvements don’t displace them, which happens often.

[00:21:26] Anthony Flint: We are talking about such big issues, and I want to make the final question about a really big one, and my sympathies for both of you to synthesize this, but that is climate change, both mitigation and resilience efforts, and the issue of climate migration. Anacláudia, what came out of World Urban 13 on the climate front?

[00:21:52] Anacláudia Rossbach: Many things. We have a very strong body of research on climate change. To start with some good news, we launched a publication. We reviewed the Generation 3.0 of the indices, the National Determined Contributions, what we call the national climate implementation plans, let’s say so in a more simple language.

[00:22:13] Anthony Flint: This is each nation’s plan for dealing with climate change?

[00:22:17] Anacláudia Rossbach: Exactly. They have to provide, and there is a third generation now. We used AI to analyze this third generation of reports, and we identified that 80 percent of these reports, they have an urban content, and half of them with some elements around housing and or informal settlements. The importance and the role of cities, of urban climate action, of local action is important to address climate change.

What we discussed, in addition to that, is the role of housing in that space. Cities are responsible for 70 percent of the emissions, and if you look at the built environment, it’s 34 percent. If we look at the city, the majority of the buildings are housing. The way we address housing, the way we address the housing crisis, will have strong implications in terms of climate. Why? Two sides of the coin. Mitigation and adaptation.

Adaptation, we spoke about informal settlements already. These are the people building incrementally, low profile, without sophisticated heating, cooling systems, and so on, very climate-friendly. They’re not contributing much to emissions. However, they are the ones being affected most. They are on the front line. Fires, disasters, landslides, floodings, sea level rise, you name it, they are on the front. Addressing issues, addressing informal settlements, making them stronger, resilient, looking at drainage, looking at protecting them from everything that I’m talking about, improving their housing conditions so that they’re more resilient in terms of disasters, of climate events.

This is an important aspect of this intersection, urban development, cities, informal settlements, housing, and climate change. We have 3 billion people living in inadequate situation right now, 300 million homelessness. We spoke about displacement, 120 million. These are the big numbers that we have. People displaced by conflicts, by climate change, and so on. This is happening as we speak. People are losing their houses. In that sense, housing, if we have to address the needs, we have to, A, either recycle existing buildings or build new ones. Recycling opportunities in the Americas, you’ll find some. In Europe, you’ll find some.

Where urbanization is really happening, in Africa and Southeast Asia, we still need to build because you just don’t have buildings to be recycled. The decisions that we take on how, where, and to whom we build will have an impact because if we don’t focus the upcoming buildings, if we don’t connect to the needs, we might exacerbate a mismatch of supply and demands and have unnecessary emissions.

If we look at location, if we keep up with the urban sprawl, we are, as I said, affecting the natural environments, biodiversity, the natural ecosystems, water. Look at metropolitan areas that are facing drought: Cape Town, Santiago, Bogota. The needs for infrastructure will imply more emissions. People move from place to place. This has impact in terms of air quality, in terms of emissions, et cetera. We have to look at location and we have to look at materials and the form and the design of all that.

Here is the intersection of how future urban development will take place, how we are going to transform the existing cities, the existing built environments, especially in the Global North, and how we are going to work with this upcoming needs in the Global South, especially in the areas that are highly urbanized. How we build our houses, how we transform our built environment, how we address informal settlements will have a direct relation in terms of climate. It’s very interesting that we are talking about that today, Anthony, because as we speak, we are here in Nairobi at a conference meeting the IPCC Cities Report authors.

For the first time, we’re going to have an IPCC Cities Report focus on cities. We have been discussing within these days the role that housing plays. In all conversations that we are having here, we all understand housing is a critical aspect. If we don’t deal with that right, we’ll not be able to achieve the 1.5 or above targets.

[00:26:46] Anthony Flint: Looking ahead, there’s going to be another World Urban Forum, the World Urban Forum 14, as I understand it, in Mexico City in 2028. Anacláudia, a brief look ahead to that gathering.

[00:26:59] Anacláudia Rossbach: First of all, I hope to meet you all in Mexico City in 2028. It will be a critical moment because we are going to follow up on the Baku call to action … housing, land, human rights, all is there. The WUF14 will be used as a moment to reflect what happened and to see how action is really taking place and being implemented. We hope also to have strong mobilization towards WUF14. In this last WUF, we had many innovations. We had a practices hub. We had the WUF Academia.

We are organizing the practices, the different segments into more structured coalitions, communities of practice, way of work. We hope to come stronger as a global, let’s say, coalition in Mexico City, have more allies, bring, because it’s in Latin America, the perspective from the Americas, and experiences from the Americas. Also, we brought in Baku for the first time, very strong, the private sector. This is one segment that needs to be part of the conversation. We hope to elevate that in Mexico City.

[00:28:14] Anthony Flint: Anacláudia Rossbach, Executive Director of UN-Habitat. Enrique Silva, Chief Program Officer at the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy. Thank you so much for joining the conversation at Land Matters.

[00:28:28] Anacláudia Rossbach: Thank you so much. It was a big pleasure to be with my former colleagues, but forever friends. Lincoln is a key stakeholder. We hope to keep our partnership very strong and towards Mexico.

[00:28:39] Enrique Silva: Rest assured, it’s very strong, and it can keep on getting strong. Wonderful to be here. Thank you.

[00:28:44] Anthony Flint: We have extensive research on global urbanization, informal settlement, climate resilience, all of the big issues facing global cities. Just check out our website. It’s lincolninst.edu. On social media, our handle is @landpolicy. I hope you’ll go ahead and rate, share, and subscribe to Land Matters, the podcast of the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy. For now, I’m Anthony Flint signing off. Until next time.

[00:29:22] [END OF AUDIO]