《加强城市安全与保障 全球人类住区报告2007》分析了对城市安全和保障造成威胁的三个主要问题，分别是：城市犯罪与暴力，房屋／土地保有权缺乏保障和强制驱逐，以及自然和人为灾害。报告分析了世界范围内这些问题存在的条件和发展趋势，着力强调了它们的潜在成因及影响，并列举了在城市、国家和全球层面行之有效的政策和措施。报告从人类安全的角度出发，关注人类的安全与保障问题而非国家安全问题，而且这些问题可以通过有效的城市政策、规划、设计及治理措施得到解决。

UN-Habitat believes that ICT can be a catalyst to improve governance in towns and cities and help increase levels of participation, efficiency and accountability in public urban policies, provided that the tools are appropriately used, accessible, inclusive and affordable. Research shows that ICT use by youth can have a direct impact on increasing civic engagement, giving them new avenues through which to become informed, shape opinions, get organized, collaborate and take action.

UN-Habitat’s experiences of using the video game Minecraft as a community participation tool for public space design confirms this view and shows that providing youth with ICT tools can promote improved civic engagement. Youth are at the center of the ICT revolution, both as drivers and consumers of technological innovation. They are almost twice as networked as the global population as a whole, with the ICT age gap more pronounced in least developed countries where young people are up to three times more likely to be online than the general population.

The purpose of this paper is to outline UN-Habitat’s approach to using information and communication technology (ICT) as an enabler to encourage youth participation in urban design and governance.

Cities are assets, solutions and drivers of economic and social development. Cities possess huge untapped economic potential that can and should be leveraged to create wealth and economic opportunities for all. This requires good urban planning that supports urban compactness, integration, and connectivity. However, even the best urban plans risk ending up unused if they are not accompanied by financial and regulatory strategies for implementation. Strategic public investments must go hand in hand with strategic funding mechanisms and supporting governance systems.

The report also 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.

Enhancing Urban Safety and Security addresses three major threats to the safety and security of cities: crime and violence; insecurity of tenure and forced evictions; and natural and human-made disasters. It analyses worldwide trends with respect to each of these threats, paying particular attention to their underlying causes and impacts, as well as to the good policies and best practices that have been adopted at the city, national and international levels in order to address these threats.

The report adopts a human security perspective, concerned with the safety and security of people rather than of states, and highlights issues that can be addressed through appropriate urban policy, planning, design and governance.