Latin American Leaders Present Regional Action Plan for New Urban Agenda.
| Autor | Scruggs, Gregory |
Fifteen months after the voluntary, landmark UN pact known as the New Urban Agenda was agreed upon in Quito, Ecuador, Latin American leaders are pushing to be the first region in the world to implement it. The UN Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (Comision Economica para America Latina y el Caribe, CEPAL) presented a plan in February at the World Urban Forum, the world's largest conference on cities, to outline how the region, which has the highest rate of urbanization on the planet, can plan, manage, and finance better cities.
"To establish a new, more equitable urban paradigm in Latin America and the Caribbean, a regional action framework is needed to guide and transform cities and sustainable urban development," CEPAL's urban management specialist, Ricardo Jordan, told NotiSur at the forum, which took place in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, last month.
Latin America was the host region of the UN Habitat III summit, which brought 40,000 people to the Ecuadoran capital for a once-every-20years gathering to discuss the future of cities. The outcome document of that summit, the New Urban Agenda, outlines a vision of sustainable urbanization for the next two decades. Individual regions, led by their UN economic commissions, are expected to draft regional action plans that adapt the agenda's vision to a local context. CEPAL's version is called "Regional Action Plan for the Implementation of the New Urban Agenda in Latin America and the Caribbean."
Demographic trends
The plan highlights some of the key changes that have taken place in Latin America since Habitat II, the second UN Conference on Human Settlements, held in Istanbul, Turkey, in 1996. Significantly, the region is undergoing a "double urban-demographic transition." The rate of rural-to-urban migration is slowing down, and the population is ageing. This scenario has created a number of highly populated metropolitan areas, often at the expense of intermediate or secondary cities, which are slowly starting to grow and provide more opportunities for those unable to thrive in megacities like Sao Paulo and Bogota.
While land consumption per capita dropped from 1990 to 2015, a key indicator of reduced urban expansion, the megacities have continued to gobble up their periphery. The urban extent of Mexico City has grown to encompass 214,867 hectares, and Buenos Aires reaches out to 196,466 ha.
These dense urban concentrations are the powerhouses of Latin America's economy. The...
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