ABOUT H3RP

In 2016, UN-Habitat will launch Habitat III, the third in its cycle of 20-year urban planning agendas. Habitat III is in the making, as power brokers in the world of urban planning continue to meet at events like the UN-Habitat’s Urban Forum in Medellin, Colombia, in April 2014. The making of Habitat III coincides with a moment of transition in the global development agenda, especially as the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) agenda reaches its conclusion in 2015. In the “post-2015” framework, Habitat III holds a central place in defining the global community’s 21st century agenda.

The Habitat III Research Project (H3RP) takes the making of Habitat III as its central research topic. We aim to understand how the process of forming the agenda renders legible the 21st century urban form by the way it defines problems, creates research agendas, generates project funding, puts forward studies and reports, and produces public policy. The project takes a critical urbanism perspective to focus on the ways the making of Habitat III results in the reproduction of unequal relations of power, especially between the Global North and South. The project is informed by Henri LeFebvre’s “right to the city” with its concern for questions of social justice and the 21st century urban form. We aim to understand the connections between power/knowledge, social justice, and urban metabolism and how these help us to make sense of the epistemological core of Habitat III and how that core will serve as the hegemonic framework for addressing the great challenges of the 21st century.

The 21st century will be defined by an epochal demographic transformation centered on the process of urbanization. The global population will grow to 9 billion people by mid-century and potentially reach 10 billion by the century’s conclusion. Nearly all of that growth will happen in cities. As early as 2030, two-thirds of the global population will be urban, with most of that growth happening in Africa, South Asia, and East Asia. The depth of these changes promises to uproot the relationship between cities and modernity, especially the political and economic roles as central places, but also the cultural contexts of national identity. Some speculate that the locus of power and influence may transcend the nation-state, a process that could thrust us into an international system defined by city-states. The extent of this urbanization is unprecedented in human history; we are entering uncharted territory for what it means to be a human being, the constitutive foundations to our ways of being, seeing, thinking, and acting. It is imperative to adjust to this new human reality in order to prepare ourselves for the 21st century.

The great demographic transition will take place within a larger context of large-scale, interconnected, global, and synchronous crises within the key sub-systems of the global system. Urbanization will happen while we are hard at work weathering the perfect storm of climate change, post-hydrocarbon civilization, food insecurity, public health emergencies, economic stress, military conflict, and ecological degradation. For some, the city constitutes humanity’s greatest invention, which will provide the innovation and resilience needed for weathering the perfect storm. For others, the urban form is the original sin that set humanity off on the trajectory of planetary destruction, in which continued urbanization will result in a hard collapse. Regardless of where cities fall in this continuum, there is little debate that cities will be a major determinant in 21st century outcomes.