Page 13 - ITU-T Focus Group Digital Financial Services – Executive Summary

City use cases: Best practices to successfully achieve

Sustainable Development Goal 11 and implement the New

Urban Agenda

Deriving recommendations to successfully implement Sustainable Development Goal 11 and the New
Urban Agenda by transforming urban sustainability policies into digitally enabled urban planning practices

International instruments and global agendas are aimed at providing guidance on urbanization and
1
2
development. These include Sustainable Development Goal 11 (SDG11) and the New Urban Agenda (NUA) ,
which facilitate the implementation of effective public policies, adoption of enhanced novel planning
techniques and the integration of technology-supported frameworks.
Today’s common urban challenges such as climate change, crime, poverty, disease, exhaustion of natural
resources, for example, do not respect borders between countries or limits between the built and the non-
built domains. Therefore, the urban scope should always include the whole liveable environment and also
consider the global dimension. Keeping this in mind, the term liveable refers to the urban and non-urban
environment as a whole.
As such, treaties, conventions, charters, declarations, amongst other instruments are promulgated by
international bodies such as the United Nations. These international instruments can often evolve as
concrete international agendas if implementation mechanisms such as indicators are elaborated on for a
more guided execution of their principles. However, it is at each country’s discretion to adopt both agendas
and instruments and in reality their endorsement is far from global. Moreover, it is noted that even in
countries which do adopt these agendas and instruments, their practical application by local administrations
is limited.

Relevant examples of inadequate implementations are the United Nations Rio Declaration of 1992 that later
evolved as the Local Agenda 21 (LA21); or the EU SET Plan of 2000. This EU Set Plan of 2000, which moved
towards the Covenant of Mayors (CoM) was intended to be the European energy agenda. Although, the LA21
included several indicators to help measure sustainability, it was inadequately implemented by cities around
the world. A similar situation was faced with CoM as it failed to be implemented despite the inclusion of
several indicators to deliver the 20/20/20 energy goals.

The limited uptake of agendas is caused by two very diverse reasons:
(i) The first reason is the lack of correspondence between policies included in the agendas and the
actual physical master planning for cities
(ii) The second reason is attributed to the fact that the data collection process required to feed the
indicators, may be quite expensive.
In light of above, this section will be highlighting the measures for the successful achievement of SDG11 and
the NUA by:
(a) fostering the incorporation of transformative public policies into urban planning actions;
(b) elaborating on urban planning design values to support its technology-based execution.

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1 Specific target addressed by this output document is 11.3-“By 2030, enhance inclusive and sustainable urbanization
and capacity for participatory, integrated and sustainable human settlement planning and management in all
countries”
2 Please refer to the final page of this document for extracts on specific commitments made by the NUA to help achieve
SDG 11.

U4SSC series 9