Sustainable Urbanization in the Paris Agreement’ – a comparative review of Nationally Determined Contributions for Urban Content”, a UN-Habitat publication coming on the heels of Habitat III, the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development and COP22. The adoption of the New Urban Agenda (NUA) on 20 October 2016, and the entry into force of the Paris Agreement on Climate Change two weeks later, on 4 November 2016, are a strong first step toward the immediate implementation of Agenda 2030 for…

Cities throughout the world are witnessing rapid growth, thus increasing the demand for high-quality services and necessitating that governments and municipalities develop improved solutions that fulfill the requirements for sustainable urban development and assure the social, economic, and environmental interactions distinctive of cities in the modern era.

The position for women in Ugandan society could be considered one of power - lessness: influenced by a range of factors including social norms and practices that prevent their full participation in the world of work (WoW), inequitable gender paygaps, and a variety of barriers in women’s professional and personal lives.

Policy and programme experiences from different countries have shown the correlation between government legitimacy, stability and peace. The Afghanistan Urban Peacebuilding Programme (AUPP) addresses this complex relationship between governance and peace. The "Safety in Afghan Cities" report, developed from the programme’s baseline survey, presents public perceptions on urban safety in eight of Afghanistan’s most strategic cities, including Kabul, Mazar-e-Sharif, Jalalabad, Herat,…

This report provides the reader with compelling evidences drawn from the UN-Habitat Sample of 200 cities showing that urban planning and design is declining globally. It demonstrates that cities are expanding endlessly to peripheries on a pattern of low residential densities and fragmented urbanization, with housing becoming unaffordable by either home ownership or rental. The report brings forward key propositions to establish the fundamentals of planned and sustainable urbanization. It is a…

Open-mindedly exploring and investigating opportunities to further improve the conditions for our cities and towns in order to offer an attractive and good living environment will often lead to visions and ideas and eventually to solutions, which might not otherwise have been considered. Continuously searching for new urban solutions is instrumental, as cities and towns are in constant transformation, morphologically, structurally, socially, culturally, and economically. Exploring new solutions…

This is the fourth in the series of reports titled UN-Habitat Support to Sustainable Urban Development in Kenya. The reports addresses the topic of urban informality and reports on a capacity building session conducted by UN-Habitat for informal settlement leaders, which was also attended by county technical officers, members of county assemblies, national government officers, development partners, and civil society organizations.

Since 2002, over 5.6 million Afghans have returned from neighbouring countries and as many as 40% of them have not been able to reintegrate in their original locations. The total number of recorded IDPs in Afghanistan is more than 1.2 million. These returnees together with IDPs, rural-urban migrants and high natural population growth have resulted in an unprecedented expansion of Afghan cities. During the past decade, returnees, IDPs and low-income migrants face major obstacles to accessing…

"The Cross-cutting Progress Report 2016 covers UN-Habitat’s activities and achievements, during the course of 2016, in the way of its four cross-cutting issues: climate change, gender, human rights, and youth. The Report presents an overview of the mandate and structure of each of the cross-cutting issues, as well as presenting case studies of the Agency’s work on the ground relating to these issues.
The four cross-cutting issues were formalised in 2013 and have since then…