Warming to their theme, Andrew Stevens and Jonas Schorr continue last week's dissection of city network associations by arguing that instead of grandiose schemes like a global senate of mayors, we must concentrate on creating popular democratic demand for city networking, and on giving more power and media visibility to the knowledge exchange efforts that cities already pursue.
Andrew Stevens and Jonas Schorr survey the landscape of city networks and local government associations and call for some serious bureaucratic Darwinism to cull the overduplication of organisations.
Alan Gilbert doesn't believe there is one, but if one must speak of a global urban agenda, he would point to local private sector lobbies as the common force driving similar agendas in cities around the world.
Yusaf Samiullah OBE argues for the complexity of urban environments, stating that this is what international development organisations must apprehend and address if they are to improve the quality of urban livelihoods.
Who sets the global urban agenda? What are the world's urban priorities? What should they be? Three international experts and a roomful of readers battled out these questions and more.
Authorities meet in Nairobi this week to set the agenda for UN-HABITAT, but domestic politics makes a lot of that agenda impossible. How can we put domestic politics back on the table?
Michele Acuto is CPD Research Fellow at the University of Southern California's Annenberg School, PhD Candidate at the Australian National University…
Sign up here for email updates
The Global Urbanist is an online magazine reviewing urban affairs and urban development issues in cities throughout the developed and developing world.
Its readers are drawn from the urban policy and international development sectors, and include urban planners, officers in local, national or international government agencies, civil society leaders, and researchers.
