At ICLEI 2014 in Bonn,
Germany, I interviewed Dr. Cynthia Rosenzweig about Habitat III. Through her pioneering work with the Urban
Climate Change Research Network, Dr. Rosenzweig is widely known in the urban resilience community. Her credentials make her a global
leader in the field of climate change and its impact on the urban form. Dr. Rosenzweig is a Senior Research Scientist
at the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies, a Professor at Barnard
College, and a Senior Research Scientist at the Earth Institute at Columbia
University. Among her many
accomplishments, Dr. Rosenzweig recently co-chaired the New York City Panel on
Climate Change, and served as a Coordinating Lead Author of the IPCC Working
Group II Fourth Assessment Report. She
is a recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship.
What is the importance of Habitat Three?
“It is tremendously important, because it’s at the General
Assembly level and it sets the urban agenda for the next twenty years. We really have reached a watershed moment in
the history of our planet in which over half the human beings on the planet now
reside in urban areas. Urbanization has
become a global process and most be taken into account in global governance,
which is what the United Nations is about.”
Do you participate in the Habitat III formation process?
“For Habitat III, I am involved with the post 2015
Sustainable Development Goals (SDG) process, because the SDG process is
happening this year, and will be presented to the United Nations for a vote at
the end of this year or the start of next year.
Habitat III comes quite soon after the post 2015 agenda, so there are
connections. For example, at ICLEI
2014, I have been participating in a think tank about initiating ideas for
Habitat III. As I understand it, the
German Development Bank asked ICLEI to organize a think tank process to begin
getting ideas circulating, especially some framing ideas for the Habitat III
process. They asked people to
participate, and I was asked to participate.”
What should be the priority for Habitat III?
“The actual framing of Habitat III evolves through time,
it’s a very, very complex global community process for it to finally come to
fruition. From my perspective, putting
forward the framing of the global urban and human settlement as a system is a
priority. It should be similar to how we
think about the climate system, which is at the base of the understanding used
by the UN climate change process. It
would understand urbanization as a planetary process. Now we have a global urban system just as we
have a global climate system, and understanding that global process has a
spectrum of cities from the largest urban areas and mega urban regions down to
human settlements of villages, which need to be included as well. It’s basically the entire system of human
settlement. The system has flows that
are the global urban system; it’s the flow of energy, of finance, of people,
rural-urban migration and country-to-country migration. So, it’s understanding the global urban
system, as a set of interconnected flows. It is this framing that I think we have to put
forward.”
“Then I would think about what is the consequence of this
framing? What would countries do with
this framing? What would be the action
item? From this frame, there can be a
call for every nation to have a national urban policy, an urban strategy, a
national plan for how to deal with the human settlements in their country. Another priority is to provide the countries
of the world with the knowledge that they need to create their national urban plans,
to create a knowledge body in some ways analogous to the IPCC. Just as we have the climate global climate
system and the IPCC, we have a global urban system and leadership from UN
Habitat. Another part of the framing
that has to happen and within that larger frame of what countries need to do is
how we translate ideas and plans to cities down on the ground. Translation is one part that is very
important, something we learned from the climate change field. For cities, we need to conceptualize them as
metropolitan regions and understand that cities need to be managed as
interconnected systems consisting of key parts such as watersheds,
infrastructure sheds, or ecosystems. We
need to understand metropolitan regions are the local governments that need to
have as much autonomy as they can.
Everyone needs to understand that we need to be managing the
metropolitan regions at the systems scale but that the local governments need
to play an important role.”
“Another Habitat III priority is the urban-rural dynamic and
its challenges. We need to frame the
entire issue of urban sustainability as absolutely complimentary to rural areas
as well. We want to see that urban and
rural areas are partners. We do not want
to frame Habitat III as urban vs. rural.”
Is there competition between the post 2015 SDG agenda and Habitat III?
“No, these are sequential and complimentary processes. But, there needs to be a stand-alone urban
sustainable development goal within the SDG agenda. We cannot ignore the city in the SDG process
and post 2015 discussions. We will have
to see what transpires with COP 2015 and SDG 2015, and then Habitat III comes
in 2016.”
Will cities transcend the nation-state in dealing with problems like
climate change?
“The United Nations will remain important. It’s called the United Nations, where the
nation-states come together to address global problems. Cities are a different political entity
compared to nation-states. They are
partners with the nation-state in the field of sustainable development. But, cities are the place where the action
occurs. There will be multi-level
governance. The United Nations has the
advantage that when it does something countries come aboard. It has the power of framing the issues,
setting the new urban agenda.”
