Kecia Rust from the Centre for Affordable Housing in South Africa in this lecture discusses the current state of housing finance in Africa.

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“Extending access to housing finance across Africa” - Kecia Rust 

Ronald Wall (Institute for Housing and Urban Development Studies, Erasmus University Rotterdam/University of the Witwatersrand, South Africa) in this lecture calls a new paradigm on how to empirically address globalization and urbanization using big data on investment flows between cities worldwide. 

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Ana Falú from the National University of Cordoba - and the Coordinator of the UN-Habitat UNI Gender Hub - in this lecture discusses urban planning from a gender perspective, with emphasis on both who has the right to the city, and who has the right to plan the city.

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“Transforming the City towards Low-Carbon Resilience” introduces urban design principles that support the transformation of existing cities towards more resilience regarding the impact of climate change.  Steffen Lehmann - Professor, University of Portsmouth/Founder of s_Lab Space Laboratory for Architectural Research and Design (Sydney – Berlin), bases the lecture on his research in sustainable cities’ transformation and introduces the compact, mixed-use and walkable city model as the most promising urbanization type.

In the past two decades through a process called “Enumeration” through which the members collect at city level data about slums, Slum Dwellers International have created a mechanism which serves to create a city wide network of urban informal settlements with the intention of the dwellers to see themselves as part of a larger subsection of the city, whose needs have been neglected and whose voice has to reach the city and the national government.

Chris Jefferies, Urban Drainage System Expert, in this lecture addresses the need to reduce the impact of city development of flooding on residents and in other places, and the worsening of the water quality in streams, rivers and lakes caused by the expansion of cities.

In this lecture Peter Ward from The University of Texas at Austin presents data drawn from a nine-country/eleven city collaborative study that examines self-built housing in old established low-income neighborhoods formed 25-40 years ago.

In this lecture Marja Hoek Smit argues that housing finance is critical to solve the housing problem, increasing, as it does, the number of households that can afford to acquire a house in the formal market, which in turn will make large scale development of middle and lower middle income housing possible.

Michael Cohen, The New School, in this lecture illustrates data about economic growth that demonstrate how cities act as engines of national economic development.

This lecture is based on the realization that little attention is being paid to the inexorable increase in urban populations, particularly in very low income countries. Buckley argues that industrial coordination problems are no doubt important, but so too is the avoidance of increasingly dysfunctional cities.