INTERNATIONAL SYMPOSIUM
May 26 - 28, 2016 | TU Berlin

Managing Urban Future

An event bringing together alumni of the Urban Management (UM) Program at TU Berlin to discuss the 21st-century challenges for urban management in light of the Habitat III process and the New Urban Agenda.

Habitat III, the UN Conference on Housing and Sustainable Urban Development will convene in Quito, Ecuador in October 2016. Through the recently published Zero Draft, Heads of State and national government officials have committed to a New Urban Agenda that embodies three main transformative principles: 1. To leave no one behind by ensuring urban equity and eradicating poverty; 2. To achieve sustainable and inclusive urban prosperity and opportunities for all; 3.To foster ecological and resilient cities and human settlements. The conception of the New Urban Agenda rests on a participative process involving a range of national and local, public, private and civil society stakeholders in order to explore ideas for new urban models to effectively address these transformative commitments. For this to happen, the New Urban Agenda needs also to connect to the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) as these are likely to steer development assistance, human resources, financial flows and political attention in the coming years. It has to create the enabling conditions for local authorities at the city level to effectively respond to the range of existing challenges and unexpected crises that they increasingly face. These enabling conditions include the development of adequate financial and technical capacities, the development of an enabling legal, fiscal and political environment, as well as management capacities for policy and program implementation and for citizen involvement.

At the backdrop of this globally vital urban agenda-setting conference, the Urban Management (UM) Program Alumni Symposium at TU Berlin brings together a diverse and international group of urban managers who are tackling in their everyday work many of those issues addressed by Habitat III. The Alumni Symposium thus provides a unique platform for face-to-face dialogues between urban managers situated professionally across the entire spectrum of actors that Habitat III aims to involve. The event aims to strengthen the UM-Alumni network, to allow alumni to share and exchange work experiences, and to discuss how the capacities of urban managers needed in light of the New Urban Agenda can be enhanced. The event offers a unique opportunity to capture emerging thinking on the potential for sustainable urban development.

The event is funded by the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD) and the UM Program.