Nairobi, 21 September 2016 - UN-Habitat is looking for new potential lecturers for the 4th season of the Global Urban Lectures. Experts interested in participating in the lectures who are already travelling to Quito for Habitat III will have the opportunity to record their lecture during the course of the conference.

Nairobi, 15 September 2016—UN-Habitat and the International Urban Training Centre are organizing a workshop ‘Action Planning for Cities Supported by the Cities Prosperity Index’ to run between November 7-12 November, 2016.

UN-Habitat UNI together with HESI (the Higher Education Sustainability Initiative) are in the process of defining a Sustainable Urban Development action plan for universities.

The action plan aims to orient universities supporting cities in their path towards sustainability and also identify better mechanisms to back effective collaboration between academic resources and urban strategies.

February 06, 2016 - The application for the International Design Collaboration for Kenya Competition completed midnight Feb 1. The competition saw a large number of applicants (over 700) from all over the world.

15 January, 2016 - The Global Urban Lecture Series is an initiative by UN-Habitat’s partnership with universities worldwide - UNI - to bring the knowledge and experiences of urban experts associated with the agency’s work to a wide audience. The series reaches not only the general public but also the 185 partner universities of UNI, and is currently being used both for personal further education purposes and professional training.

Kenya, 14 January 2016 - UN-Habitat is launching a competition to promote collaboration between Kenya’s students and their peers elsewhere and to promote the importance of urban design. The competition is being organized in collaboration with Kenya’s Urban Development Department (UDD) and the Ministry of Land, Housing and Urban Development. It is part of UN-Habitat's support to the Kenya Municipal Program under the broad framework of ‘Support to a Sustainable Urban Development Sector in Kenya’, which is funded by SIDA.

In this lecture, Dr Clos discusses planned versus spontaneous urbanization, the issues this entails and three concrete principles for planning sustainable cities. Together they form a three-legged approach to sustainable urbanization.

Christian Werthmann from Leibniz University, Hannover, summarizes his international experience of non-formal urbanism into ten points aimed to act as a guideline for designers intending to work in these contexts. Based on real life experiences and research he describes what is essential to keep in mind when designing towards sustainable urbanization in dense urban environments. This lecture was filmed in association to the Metropolis Nonformal - Anticipation symposium in Munich 2013 including the launch of the Laufen Manifesto for a Humane Design Culture.

In this lecture, Eugenie Birch draws heavily on history to illustrate the location, pace, trajectory, documentation and varied solutions of historic slum conditions in Western Europe and North America; tracking contemporary slum development in Latin America, Asia and Africa, and outlines the commonalities and differences with past experience. Birch places slum development in stages that correspond to the urbanization rates and peak growth of slums of the places in question, and discusses adaptations, their benefits and costs.