The Kuwait National Report for the third United Nations Conference on Housing and Sustainable Urban Development (Habitat III) examines these six key areas: (1) urban demography, (2) land and urban planning, (3) the environment and urbanization, (4) urban governance and legislation, (5) urban economy, and (6) housing and basic services. The report also discusses past issues and lessons learned and identifies challenges that must be addressed and resolved through the New Urban Agenda.

The overall aim of this HCPD is to promote the New Habitat Agenda: ensuring the sustainability of urban growth as a driving force as well as a source of equitable development with the power to change and improve lives. UN-Habitat plays an active role in urban development and urban policy. Through partnerships with the Ministry of Lands, Housing and Urban Development (MLHUD), UN-Habitat has assisted in identifying key urban issues and areas needing support to improve urban development in Uganda.

One important pattern among highly urbanized countries is that they tend to rely more heavily on land-based taxes. A review of 64 countries shows a strong positive correlation between the urban population percentage and land-based taxes as a percentage of GDP.
The table presented in the adjacent box illustrates this point. While the average land-based tax revenue for these countries is about 0.75 per cent of GDP, the average among highly urbanized, high-income countries is over 1.5 per…

This guide is intended for trainers and facilitators in the GLTN and UN-Habitat Land-based Finance (LBF) Training course. LBF is a collective name given to a range of instruments by which local governments expand their revenue base and generate funds that will help them realize their service delivery, infrastructure development and maintenance goals. The broader contexts within which this tool is being developed are local governance and sustainable urbanization. The LBF tool is premised on the…

Lebanon’s refugee crisis has highlighted the need for much closer coordination among the various organisations and local authorities involved in the response.

All cities aspire to be great cities. This pocket guide aims to demon-strate why resilience is for everyone and for every city. While there is often an emphasis on planning for resilience in the world’s most rapidly urbanizing areas, many of the case studies featured here ex-press the need for, and value of, resilience building in those regions where urban population growth has peaked.

The report identifies successful governance mechanisms for efficient and equitable provision of public services in metropolitan areas of developing countries, and shares experiences and methods to making public service provision more viable in peri-urban areas of large cities and in smaller urban centres of these countries.