The centre of the wheel marks 0% achievement and the rim marks 100% achievement. City specific planned achievement of SDG targets by 2030 can be mapped on this wheel and will provide a unique profile representing the city’s development aspiration.

Baseline Assessment

The SDG City Assessment and Measurement Tool will establish a baseline on the city’s current achievement of SDGs. This baseline will enable cities to undertake Voluntary Local Reviews. When mapped on the SDG City Wheel against the city’s target profile, gaps to be filled to reach these targets will be identified.

Strategic Planning

Through an inclusive strategic planning process, the analysis of gaps will inform interventions needed to reach targets. These can be categorised into four baskets.

• Basket 1: Enablers; e.g. plans, governance set-up, regulations, municipal financing instruments, land management systems etc.
• Basket 2: Capacity gaps to be addressed; e.g. revenue collection and public financial management, solid waste management, land management, urban planning etc.
• Basket 3: Public Infrastructure; e.g. basic services – water, electricity, lighting, solid waste management, public transportation, public space, affordable housing, education and health facilities.
• Basket 4: Economic initiatives; e.g. tourism investments, business districts, industrial parks etc.

Each intervention will be analysed to ascertain the extent to which it contributes to achieving the city’s SDG targets and its cost effectiveness.

Capacity Support and Technical Assistance

SDG Cities will provide through UN-Habitat, UN and other partners support in building city capacities in key areas of policy, planning, governance and local financing. Each city will be encouraged to establish an urban lab that draws together local academics and practitioners. Using the city development strategy as a starting point, the lab will develop projects (Basket 3 and 4) that would contribute to implementing the cities’ development strategies and accelerating SDG achievement. By networking participating labs, global experiences sharing and advisory to cities can be made possible.

Leveraging Finance for public infrastructure and economic initiatives

SDG Cities will support the financial analysis of these impact projects and ascertain the most effective financing strategy - often blending public and private sources of finance for largescale impact. It will also identify financing risks and provide strategies through which risks may be mitigated. SDG Cities will match-make city investment packages with sources of finance through a City Investment Platform (CIP) that will link investor-ready initiatives to a broad range of financiers.

Sharing knowledge for global impact

The World Urban Forum and existing experience sharing platforms will provide participating cities with a means to share knowledge, experiences and tools. It will enable cities with similar development profiles to form communities of practice, and by harvesting knowledge and data, will allow UN-Habitat to developed targeted normative advice to specific groupings of cities.  It will also provide a means to broaden the participation of cities worldwide in SDG Cities programme.

The Programme expects to impact 1000 cities with a total population of over 1 billion people by 2030. It aims to achieve this level of scale by structured knowledge sharing between cities and systematizing support through the following instruments: SDG Cities Measurement and Recognition; Urban Labs; Impact Investment Simulation and City Investment Platform.