Urban Governance and Participation

UNESCO concentrates particularly on urban policies through interdisciplinary networks of comparative, international research. This approach focuses on the in-depth analyses of urban development processes.

There has been urban planning in industrialized countries for over fifty years, but almost nowhere has this met with unqualified success. To give just one example, large sectors of the world’s cities are built with neither technical nor professional help and without any public regulations. The proportion of these haphazard but permanent cities in developing countries is often as much as 60% of the built-up area.

Urban studies in the Western world have until now clearly been looking at the generation rather than redistribution of wealth and public services; at functional specialization rather than a general mix; at segregation rather than cohesion; and, finally, at power-wielding agents rather than residents’ participation. With globalization of the economy imposing other ways of doing business, urban management has had to cope with decentralization, the emergence of new actors and new partnerships as well as redefining the role of the State in the regulation of available space.

In this context, there are two major challenges guiding UNESCO's action:

• developing knowledge capable of contributing to the formulation and implementation of new urban policies, with the emphasis on democratic governance as the basis, and
• capacity building for residents, technicians and decision-makers in the urban domain.