World Cities Report 2022 launched at WUF11 in Katowice, Poland

KATOWICE: World Cities Report 2022: Envisaging the Future of Cities, was published at the Eleventh Session of the World Urban Forum, being held in Katowice, Poland. It is a bi-annual report, which is an authoritative document on the state of the world’s cities.

The launch was attended by Maimunah Mohammad Sharif, Executive Director, UN-Habitat; Małgorzata Jarosińska-Jedynak, Secretary of State at the Ministry of Development Funds and Regional Policy, Poland; Marcin Krupa, Mayor, City of Katowice; and Ben Arimah, Head of Global Reports and Trends Unit, UN-Habitat. The speakers spoke on the key findings of the report, it’s relevance for the cities of the post-pandemic world and recommendations.

Speaking at the event, Sharif discussed the need for a new social contract, since our approach towards development before the pandemic was an unsustainable one. “Business-as-usual leading to 2020 was an unsustainable model. We must take lessons from our responses to the COVID-19 and create a better, greener and more sustainable urban future. UN-Habitat advocates for the optimistic scenario and believes that achieving equal and inclusive cities must involve a new social contract in the form of universal basic income, universal health coverage and universal housing and basic services,” she added. 

The report intends to inform us about the state of cities of the world, anticipate the direction of growth they’ll take and allow us course-correct our policies and efforts to build cities as habitable urban spaces.  To this effect, Małgorzata Jarosińska-Jedynak discussed the need for cities to plan such as to meet the expectations of the urban dwellers. She said, “The Report speaks about coordinated, cohesive urban planning including the area of housing. This is extremely important and part of Poland’s National Urban Strategy for 2030.”

Marcin Krupa, Mayor of Katowice stresses on the importance of local governments in achieving the agenda of having sustainable and liveable cities in the future. Talking about the need to come up with multiple solutions to existing urban issues he says, “we need to stress that challenges are the same, but the problems might have a different scale. Our actions should also, therefore be diversified, there is no one-size-fits-all solution.” The report also discussed the idea of 15-minute cities to provide quality life to citizens, which means all basic needs of the people should be accessible to them within 15 minutes.

In the past two years, the future of cities has drastically changed, owing to a global pandemic. The World Cities Report 2022, therefore, becomes all the more important to address issues which were hitherto not apparent. The findings of the report were summarized by Ben Arimah, Head of Global Reports and Trends Unit, UN-Habitat. One of the important points that this report addresses is that the cities need to be better prepared for disasters, apart from the pandemic. The governments need to build resilience across multiple dimensions. He also stressed on the fact that the future of the world is largely urban, but not necessarily large metropolitan cities. we need shift our focus to small and medium-sized cities and this is where the policies need to focus.