Dialogue 1 - The Global Housing Crisis: What is the Plan? (WUF13)

Good morning, everyone.
We're going to be starting very shortly, so if I could ask everyone to take their seats, please.
Thank you.
It always takes a few seconds to get the room settled.
I'm trying to encourage diplomatically for everyone to take their seats.
My name is Carlota Rabelo and I'll be your MC for today.
Good morning, first of all, and thank you so much for being here with us for what's said to be truly an exceptional discussion.
We are beginning today with a very simple but urgent question.
How do we turn solutions into systems that can truly house the world? We are gathering here in Baku at a moment when the global housing crisis has become one of the defining urban challenges of our time.
Today, nearly 3 billion people live in inadequate housing conditions with more than 1 billion living in informal settlements, a number projected to rise dramatically in the decades ahead.
What makes this crisis so urgent is that it's no longer confined to one region or even one income group.
Rising housing costs, inequality, weak land governance, and fragmented urban growth are pushing adequate housing further out of reach, not only for the most vulnerable, but increasingly for working and middle class households as well.
When we talk about adequate housing, as you all know, it's not just about shelter.
It's about health, it's about safety, dignity, opportunity, and the realization of fundamental human rights.
It also requires us to rethink the social and environmental function of land and to ask how housing systems can become more inclusive, resilient, and of course, sustainable.
Today's dialogue is designed to move towards action.
It asks how governments, cities, communities, and the private sector can all work together to build housing systems that are more inclusive, affordable, and sustainable at scale.
We have an exceptional group of leaders and practitioners with us today, and I hope you are as excited as I am for I'm sure will be a rich and solutions oriented discussion.
Now, without further ado, it's my absolute pleasure to invite to the stage, our hosts to welcome you to today's session.
Please join me in welcoming Anna Claudia Roslak, the Executive Director of UN Habitat.
And also to the stage, Ghosn sieva, the 13 Deputy National Coordinator.
Thank you.
Apologies.
I forgot to introduce one panelist now, and of course, Emilia Says as well.
Welcome to the stage because you'll be joining the discussion here as well, the Secretary-General of the United Cities and local governments.
Thank you.
Anna Claudia, you have the floor.
Good morning to all of you.
Our host Kushan.
So thank you for hosting us this week.
Emilia, I Ministers, Excellencies, our distinguished guest partners here.
Welcome again to the Wen forum for this first dialogue.
The theme of this dialogue talks to the core of this ben forum, to the core of the new urban agenda that put housing at the center and to the core of Habitats new strategic plan for 26 29.
Launching the concrete discussions of the Wan forum today, thinking about the crisis and reflecting about the crisis will be very, very strategic.
I hope that these conversations today will set the scene for the upcoming conversations that we are going to have led by our partners here today, but also by UN habitat.
We all understand the importance of housing to address all the challenges that we have related to the sustainable development goals, health, education, employment, access to water.
We all understand that housing is critical for cities because cities that provide well located service and affordable housing are more productive, more competitive, and inclusive, but also better resource in terms of revenues.
Yet today at this session, ten years after the New Urban Agenda that put housing at the center, 50 years after the creation of the UN habitat that put shelter crisis at the center, we're still facing lack of access to housing.
It's not a gap.
We're talking about one in three people worldwide.
So this is why it is a global crisis.
It is really a systemic failure.
Existing housing systems that are not working for all and emerging housing systems that need to be consolidated and stabilized.
Affordability is the big common denominator, what had been a structural issue in the Global South is now affecting cities, residents in the global north as well.
We see that today almost half of the households spend more than one third of their income on housing.
And this is a parameter that is not established for all geographies.
Spending 30% of the income in a city in South America, in a city in Africa is actually beyond unaffordable.
The purchase capacity in many, many cities in many geographies is much more limited.
We also see that we have 2 billion people that have not access to safe drinking water and over 3 billion a lack access to sanitation and insecure land tenure continues to leave households in a vulnerable situation to displacement and eviction that are happening as we speak.
This is our reality.
Looking ahead, by 2050, as we all know, the global population will increase.
We are going to have 2 billion people coming to cities, most of them in urban areas and in Asia and in Africa.
Um, and actually, half of this growth is concentrated in just eight countries in cities.
So it is not a smooth transition or a gradual transition.
It is indeed the fastest wave of urbanization that we have seen in the recent human history.
The big question that I posted actually yesterday in my speech, do we know we prepared? Yes.
We have to be prepared.
I hope this forum helps us to increase our strength and our preparedness to face the crisis.
No, there's no single answer.
There's no single entity that has the answer.
I would just repeat what I said at the opening.
The answers are spread in several pieces, but we have been able to bring these pieces together at this World Urban Forum.
I will share a couple of messages to start, four or five messages.
The first one Housing solutions must be holistic.
This is what we have been discussed through the open ended working group on housing, which is a critical initiative by member states supported by UN habitat.
Housing policies should be integrated with legal policy and planning reforms.
Land is critical.
We need land governance, we need land policies, and of course, the informal settlements remain an emergency to be handled.
We are talking about more than 1 billion people living in informal settlements.
We need to look at the territory, how the territories organized, the dynamics of secondary and intermediary cities, but also understand the big challenges that the metropolitan areas, urban areas are facing.
But we need to be realistic and context oriented, connect housing with social, economic, and climate goals.
The second message, expanding access to adequate housing is not only about building units.
Of course, we need to build units.
We still need to produce housing to address a the gaps that we have, especially in growing cities, especially in the global South, where we still don't have a stock of housing, but we do have buildings and we do have opportunities to recycle the urban environment and expand the supply of buildings for low income housing.
Everywhere, everywhere we look around, we can see vacancy, we can see buildings and spaces that are under utilized in cities.
We have to pay attention to that.
Informal settlements already provide housing for millions.
We need to recognize their potential and leverage it.
We already have several experiences at the project level, at city level, at a national scale, countries that have invested in informal settlements as a strategic economic development policy.
This is how people actually managed to get to the cities informal settlements, they have been the gateway throughout urbanization processes for many, many people, women, people to have access to the opportunities that are in cities.
There is a whole range of businesses, small, medium enterprises that could be leveraged at this level.
We have many experiences worldwide as well of self but community community led housing, incremental housing.
More recently, we've seen countries investing a lot in incremental housing as one alternative and Flexible solutions can address the needs and aspirations of the youth, older persons, displaced populations, low income groups, persons with disabilities, and so on and so forth.
The third message is about land.
Tenure security, land management is critical.
We all know how land is a the most expensive input for housing production.
As Cotta said before, and we are putting upfront this principle of the new urban agenda, recognizing that land has a social and environmental function is critical, but this needs to be embedded in legal frameworks and reflected in urban plans because land is limited and the most expensive input for housing.
My fourth message is that conventional housing finance is not enough.
The well established housing finance systems are clearly not working and not addressing the needs of all segments of the society.
But we do see that countries are developing creative innovative ways to fund housing.
We have a large body of experience around microfinance and people funding incrementally their housing improvements through microfinance, community based mechanisms to leverage community savings and so on.
But also we see countries like Kenya, President Ruto was saying yesterday in his opening, they have been able to leverage $4 billion in three years attribute 270,000 homes.
They are not copying and paste existing models they're using principles from other housing finance systems, especially from Latin America, but creating and adapting to their own context, not with South challenges, constraints, and political issues as he actually established.
We need to be creative, but it is important that countries count on their own housing finance systems and leveraging domestic finance is critical.
There is no way that Kenya could have leveraged $4 billion from the climate finance space, from the development bank space, and so on and so forth.
My final point is that the housing climate agendas need to be to work together.
The way cities are growing right now, sprawling right now is led by housing housing for the poor, housing for the rich, housing gated housing, public housing, self built housing formal and informal.
It's critical that we look back at the new urban agenda where we spoke about densities, we spoke about compact cities, and we really address the location of the house, but also the materials.
The sector accounts for about 34% of the global CO two emissions so we can save our footprint in terms of needed infrastructure, but also if we contain urban spraw but also through the materials that we use for construction.
Then finally, to conclude, we really need to work at the local capacity.
We all need to understand the importance of having the right frameworks at the national level, the urban policies, the housing finance systems that orients action on the ground at the end of the day, it's at the local level that communities come together, talk, and discuss the social pact that will orient the growth of the cities and therefore, the planning of future housing.
I would like to close, thank all of you.
We don't know the answer.
We are listening to you.
The open ended working group is our critical mechanism right now to work with member states to a uh, extract policy recommendations to countries, to cities to address the housing challenges.
We have already advanced a lot on that with Kenya, France, now Azerbijan, Somalia in identifying critical issues such as land, finance, informal settlements, social housing, climate resilient housing we're discussing here today, but also bringing experiences together.
At WUF, we are going to have the practices hub that it's bringing together more than 500 practices that we consolidated in the last months, year actually in preparation for the WUF.
This is the embryo of the housing platform that is an output of the open ended working group.
We want to work with you together, get your expertise to feed into this critical intergovernmental process, and finally in July to review the new urban agenda and to look ahead for the next ten years, how is it that we can address housing? Thank you very much, and I wish you a great passion today.
And thank you for all of you coming here.
I see the faces.
About the discussions of the forum we can bring and indeed, we are working also on that front, and I think we can extract from indigenous people a lot of the knowledge and the wisdom to face the housing crisis.
Um, I see there are some cities in Latin America, for example, to give you an example, Santa Marta in Colombia, or Bogota, Colombia, they have used indigenous wisdom and knowledge to plan the cities.
I hope as you and Haptat we'll be able to do that, but also the way of living the way we build our houses.
I hope that we can count on you as partners to discuss with us how we can address the global housing crisis.
Thank you so much.
Anna Claudia, thank you very much and for challenging all of us to rethink how we can help shape better cities and to really collaborate with one another.
Now, let's please welcome here to the podium, Gernsieva, please.
Thank you.
Excellencies, distinguished guests, colleagues, partners, ladies and gentlemen, Azerbaianaks Gals.
Welcome to A.
Welcome to Azerbaijan.
Good morning to everyone.
I'm honored here to represent my Chairman Mr.
Anand, Chairman of the State Committee on Urban Planning and Architecture and he's also the W 13 National Coordinator.
Madam Anakna Rosbach, you highlighted all challenges and some of the opportunities.
Nevertheless, I will try to go through within our mandate, but in general.
Colleagues, now here, it's my personal honor as well to speak to you and greet you here in Azerbijan and welcome to Dawfthirteen and this high level dialogue.
Really, it's a good start, I wouldn't say good beginning, but good continuation on the journey that we will go together.
As the host country of Bin, Azerbijan is proud of bringing together a global community of leaders, thinkers, and change makers in this historic city, where a crossroads of cultures and an ancient testament to urban evolution.
Today, we gather not simply to witness the growth of our cities, but to fundamentally shape the future.
As we heard, the numbers are clear and the urgency is real.
I will not repeat again because they were clearly articulated by Madame Ana Clade Rosbach.
But I would highlight that there is no longer a localized issue or a challenge unique to a specific region.
It's a structural multidimensional global crisis that cuts across nature and emerging economies alike.
When a family lacks a safe, affordable, and well located home, the foundation of human development weakness.
Weaken, sorry.
Without secure housing, we cannot achieve health equity, build economic resilience, and cannot protect our populations from the escalating threats of climate change.
This is not only a housing challenge, it is a development challenge.
It's a climate challenge and the human rights challenge.
The right to adequate housing is clearly recognized in international commitments and reffirm in the New Urban Agenda.
The next decade requires us to move from recognition of this challenge to implementation.
In this regard, I have to highlight a couple of questions that also will share our opinions on the opportunities.
The first question would be, what are the most promising opportunities for shaping progress towards adequate housing? Of course, one of the strongest opportunities lies in integrated urban planning.
Housing cannot be treated separately, plan separately from transport infrastructure jobs, public services, and climate resilience.
Cities that plan housing together with infrastructure and social services create stronger and more affordable communities.
Another major opportunity has already been highlighted is land governance.
When land is managed responsibly and its social and environmental function is protected, affordability becomes more achievable.
Within our mandate, our committee is mandated for special planning.
So therefore, land governance, not directly in our mandate, but planning is definitely ours, therefore, so I'm highlighting these points.
Innovation in housing finance is equally important.
Blended finance, stronger participation of development banks, and international financial institution support for rental housing help expand access.
Definitely a digital innovation, application of technologies and new advanced construction methods also offer new pathways to faster greener and more cost effective housing delivery.
These are the issues that we can look at and opportunities.
The second question would be about partnership.
Again, I'm not going to repeat, but there is a role for each stakeholder, each partner in the urban ecosystem.
While the governments provide the policy framework through national housing strategies, legal protections, land use planning, and other policy issues, the private sector brings scale, innovation, investments to implement these policies.
Definitely, civil society play a great role because they work directly with the communities.
They hear their needs and requirements and when they are supported by the relevant regulation and incentives, then they are more helpful to the communities to reach to access the affordable housing.
For Azerbijan climate resilience and inclusive urbanization is a core national priority and fully integrated into our Azerbijan 2030 national priorities.
We view urban planning as a strategic tool to bridge social divide and manage rapid course.
It's our convention that drives our active global engagement.
We are honored to serve as the co chair together with our partner from Somalia, open ended intergovernmental expert working group on adapt housing for all established by UN habitat.
In this role, alongside our partners, others and Yuan Habita specifically, we remain committed to elevating adequate housing as a political, economic, and rights based priority on the international stage.
By the way, we are meeting with this group today to further discuss the issues and put forward the solutions.
In Azerbijan, as already mentioned, the committee that I'm representing here is directly responsible and mandate central government body for spatial planning.
In our planning processes, all the principles that had been highlighted here are considered primarily to ensure that the cities become people centered and people human oriented.
Symbolically, in 2016, guided by the strategic roadmap on affordable housing, the government established the State Housing Development Agency built on state owned land and Supported by the public infrastructure, this agency delivers modern energy efficient homes at below market prices.
To support long term accessibility, a significant share of these homes is backed by the mortgage and credit guarantee fund, offering quite incentive financing accessible to the social groups.
One of the strongest examples of applying the principles of the new urban agenda is also the Great Return Program in the liberated territories of Azerbijan.
Large scale reconstruction and redevelopment efforts are underway in these areas that were subjected to urban Sit and Eco seit during nearly three decades of occupation.
The principles of new urban agenda and then and new approach to the urban planning really framed our projects, planning activities in these territories.
They are built with a focus on sustainability, resilience, and inclusion, smart cities and smart villages, green energy zones, climate sensitive planning from the basis of the start of this process.
Housing is developed together with access to transport, education, healthcare, employment, and social services, applying the 15 minutes city principles in these territories.
This demonstrates an important lesson.
Adequate housing is not only about homes.
It's about creating complete and functioning communities and ecosystem.
The third question that I would highlight is, what are the essential actions needed for the next decade of implementation of the New Urban Agenda to 2036? Of course, as already again, Madame Rosbach highlighted, is the political priority.
It should be fully integrated into national development strategies, climate action policies, and economic planning programs.
Strong institutional cooperation definitely is necessary.
Governments, municipalities, international financial institutions, private sector communities must work together through long term partnerships.
Financing systems must become more inclusive and measurable delivery must guide our actions.
Monitoring definitely is one of the important aspects.
Clear targets and the monitoring systems.
The open ended working group on adequate housing for all offers an important platform to strengthen international cooperation, exchange practical solutions, and align institutional efforts globally.
The next decade must become the decade of delivery.
As we engage in this dialogue here, let us focus on tangible partnerships, shared data, and scalable frameworks.
I wish you all and all participants of the forum events an inspiring and highly productive dialogues, one that transformed global vision into concrete action for housing equally.
We believe you will have time to go out to the city, enjoy the beauty of city and hospitality of our people.
We as organizers, stand ready to provide any information you may require.
Thank you very much.
Shan, thank you very much and thank you for such a warm welcome as well.
Please join me now in welcoming to the podium, Emilia Says, the Secretary-General of United Cities and local governments.
Thank you.
Good morning, everyone.
What a very difficult act to follow.
A very impressive panel, a little bit frightening, actually.
What can you say in the morning during a morning where you're going to be addressed by some of the most knowledgeable people that I know around housing issues? What can you say when you have been working with these very people and these institutions for several decades? What are we doing wrong? What is working? What do we know? What do we need to change? So the set has been framed really well, I think.
I am hearing a lot of human rights perspective, dignity perspective.
I think this is a very big change on the agenda which we have been constructing since the new urban agenda ten years ago.
I think it is very relevant to make it about rights, to make it about justice, to make it about dignity.
But I think there are a few other issues that we would like to see addressed.
I'm very pleased to address you today.
On behalf of the international municipal movement of United cities and local governments, a collective that has actually been putting out there how difficult this crisis is and that this is a structural crisis that is no longer about one issue alone, one part of the world alone, the global north or the global South, but truly a developmental but also a democratical challenge agenda.
The future of democracies is at stake with the housing agenda.
Because we are no longer talking about Islam upgrading or informalities as a challenge, but we are talking as well about people that have jobs that have a challenge in housing.
This is not new, by the way, but it is increasingly visible.
The numbers are growing and they are staggering.
Allow me to address some of the issues that we think as municipal movement that we need to address, some of the mistakes that we know we have been making.
We continue to plan for social housing in the wrong places.
We do that.
We continue to do that.
With the involvement of many of the institutions that are here in the room, we will need to change that.
We continue to evict people, people that have constructed their own houses, and they are evicted because they are in informal areas, because we cannot provide or because the value of that land has increased, and we see land as income.
In many parts of the world, land is seen as income, just as housing is seen as a commodity and local and regional governments, territories are part and parcel of that challenge of that problem.
We will need to change that.
But we also are aware of the many things that we have been trying to do right, calling for national governments to have different strategies, to include communities in defining the way that they need to live.
Indigenous people knowledge.
Indeed, in this changing world where climate, where displacement is changing the demography.
It is very important for us to ensure that it is a co creation, that habitat that housing is a co creation because we need to protect residents from displacement and we need to provide residents everywhere the service that they need.
And we will not be able to do that if it is not part of national but also international plans.
We will need to address speculation.
Speculation is something that plays a big role both in the global North and the global South, and it's not only because of commodification, but also because of bigger interests around market.
We have been hoping for a very long time to ensure that local economic development would address all the needs and that housing market would follow.
It hasn't happened, it will not happen, and it will not happen if we don't change the financial architecture to address this.
Around the world, we are asking to exclude social housing from many of the investment deficits and from the debt deficits that many countries have.
If we don't address that, those big numbers, the billions, we will not be able to reach communities on the ground.
We are also asking for a different type of funding to allow local and regional governments and I am sure you will hear it throughout the morning today, both Jonathan from Housing International, but also Jeffrey Sachs has been working on this.
Local financing needs to change.
It needs to change in the international financial infrastructure, but also in the national infrastructure.
What am I going to tell Is? She's also here with us from Kaiser.
They have been working on this for a very long time.
But we need the national, the international and the regional development banks to align on this.
Yes, to work on the capacity of local and regional governments, but capacity is not enough.
Competencies is also important.
When you talk about competencies, let us think that housing is not a competence of local and regional government everywhere in the world.
Unlike what you might think, they are certainly responsible, but the competence is not there.
Unless we change that competence, there are issues that we will not be able to address.
Yes, let us celebrate some of the achievements that we have made with the open ended working group and the recommendations that have been made throughout the years.
But we will need to become bigger in scope, we will need to become more ambitious in range.
We will need to make sure that this is a collective agenda that goes beyond local and territorial realities, that goes beyond national boundaries, and that is the commitment that my organization, United cities and local governments on behalf of the movement is making with partners like AIED and others with cities alliance with you all.
We need to make this about justice.
So an international Justice Housing Academy is in the making now to address some of the good practices that we have been putting in place and to ensure that we find ways for those to become more than pilots but become structural changes to ensure that I we are addressing the discrimination that we see in access to housing and that remains a critical issue because it reflects the structural inequalities that we pursue and I was happy to hear the perspective of indigenous people that need to be included in these discussions, but not only communities in general will need to play a very important role in this.
If you ask us, housing is no longer an emergency.
It is a structural housing where the future of humanity and in particular, the future of democracy is at play.
Please do count on us to address some of these issues to address the mistakes that we have been making, the deficits in local and regional governments policies that we have identified in the past and ready to be creative and bold with you in the future.
Thank you very much.
Thank you.
Thank you, Emilia and please join me in thanking our three fantastic speakers for such a great opening to our session.
Of course, Ana Clario Rosbk, Gushnzieba and Emilia Sas.
Thank you.
Thank you very much.
Now we're going to hear and see a video address by Volker Türk, the High Commissioner for Human Rights.
Dear friends, I am delighted to address the forum today, although I am very sorry that I cannot join you in person for this important event.
In Europe, we believe that housing is about dignity and fairness.
It is about fulfilling a basic right of every human being a right to live in a safe and healthy place.
However, for too many people in Europe and across the world, this right is not the reality.
What we face is not just a housing crisis, it is in fact a social crisis and it weakens our cohesion.
It is an economic crisis that threatens our competitiveness, limits our labor mobility, and holds back education.
It is a crisis that hurts our demographics because too many young people cannot leave home to begin a family of their own.
Essential workers, young people, and those living with disadvantages suffer the most from the crisis across our communities, rising rents and limited access to social housing lead to growing risks of homelessness.
We count more than 1 million homeless across the European Union, including more than 400,000 children.
This number is truly unacceptable.
In the EU, it is primarily in member states alongside with regions and cities who are responsible for housing.
But the European Union also has a role to play, and we can make a positive difference.
We're proud to have come up with the first ever European plan to support housing for all.
We focus on affordable housing because a low income should not be a barrier to secure a home.
We focus on sustainable housing because energy efficient buildings are not only good for the planet, they're also good for your pockets, and we focus on quality housing because a good home can help to improve people's lives and build better communities.
To deliver on all of these fronts, the European Affordable Housing Plan sets out to boost supply and mobilize investments.
We aim to enable immediate solutions while also driving long term reforms.
We put the people most affected by the crisis, such as students and homeless citizens at the heart of our solutions.
We can only make a change if we act together.
That's why we are establishing a new European housing Alliance to enable closer cooperation and the sharing of good practices between countries, cities, and regions.
But we also want to look and learn beyond Europe.
I would therefore like to thank you and Habitat for dedicating this year's World Urban Forum to housing.
Together, through this forum, we have an opportunity to share challenges and solutions.
We have an opportunity to exchange ideas and innovations.
But most of all, we have an opportunity to make a difference underground and in our communities.
Across the world, the call for housing is waiting to be answered.
Let's deliver this answer together once and for all.
Thank you.
As you could probably tell, that wasn't Mr.
Turk on screen, but rather than Jorgensen, the European Commissioner for Energy and Housing.
I'm hoping that now we can play indeed the Adré by Mr.
Vocker Turk.
A deep housing crisis is unfolding around the world.
Tonight, billions of people will sleep in homes that are unsafe, unhealthy, or at risk of being taken away.
In cities on every continent, people are facing forced evictions, soaring living costs, and severe shortages of affordable housing.
Homelessness is rising.
Large scale development projects are displacing millions.
Climate chaos is uprooting families and then destroying their livelihoods and in war zones, people are forced to flee and to live in the most precarious conditions often for years on end.
Those living in poverty and the most marginalized, including women and girls, are hit the hardest.
Inequalities are deepening between and within countries.
Many of you see these realities firsthand in your cities and communities, but this is not the whole picture.
Even as challenges grow, so does our capacity to respond with creativity, solidarity, commitment, and human rights are at the center.
Some cities are making remarkable progress with policies that put people first.
For example, cities as diverse as Guangzu in South Korea, Montevideo, in Uruguay, Vienna in Austria and many others continue to invest in public, affordable housing.
In Spain, Barcelona has adopted tax reforms to deter large scale speculation.
Medin in Colombia and other cities have implemented inclusive housing programs for displaced people.
These efforts can pave the way for broader transformation.
This forum is an opportunity to build on that momentum and put our world on a more sustainable path.
National, regional and local authorities all have a role to play and human rights must guide the way.
When housing policies are grounded in equity, solidarity, and justice, societies are more inclusive, more resilient, and more sustainable.
When we focus on the most marginalized and ensure they are involved in decisions that affect them, we strengthen social cohesion.
When housing is treated as a human right, not a commodity, people are protected from the whims of the market and those who profit from it.
As the climate crisis gathers space, we need homes and urban infrastructure that are carbon neutral and can withstand extreme weather events.
Some cities from Copenhagen in Denmark to Gygi Rhonda are experimenting with new models of public investment that support sustainable design.
We need to build on these ideas, ensuring they are anchored in human rights.
National and local budgets are key determining whether cities can allocate resources to housing and sustainable infrastructure.
My office advocates for human rights economies that put people first.
It's a strategy that enables governments to plan beyond short term political cycles and deliver lasting change for the people they serve.
We are at a moment of possibility with political will and by working together, we can build sustainable housing solutions for people everywhere.
Thank you.
How are we all feeling? I feel like there's a little bit of energy that's needed in this room and I know that often asking for interactive sessions does not entice the audience the most, but I think we keep talking about visualizing the housing crisis.
As you might have seen when you sat down on your chair, We have some cards about who you are for this short segment.
Please amuse us for the next few minutes.
You are all coming from all corners of the globe and this room represents the world with its 8.3 billion people.
That means that each of you or rather each seat represents around 9 million people.
That's the responsibility you have on your shoulders today with a little card that you have.
I want to ask you some questions to help us in the room visualize the housing crisis at scale.
You just need to reply and respond by standing up or raising your hand if you cannot stand up.
And if your answer is no, you just stay sat down and look around the room as you answer because hopefully that will help you also get a sense of these numbers.
Let's move to the question, the first question.
Does your home have safe access to drinking water? Stand up if you do or if your card says yes, look around the room so you can get a sense Each of you represents around 9 million people, so that's a responsibility you have.
Excellent.
There we go.
As you can see, 2.2 billion people globally lack access to safely managed drinking water.
That's 38% lower access to safely managed drinking water in countries that are, of course, affected by conflict and instability, which, as you can see here, the proportion of people in the map.
I'll invite you now to sit down as we move to question number two, which is, do you have safely managed sanitation at home? Again, raise your hand or stand up if your answer is yes.
I wish I could walk across, but sadly the microphone has them in a fixed position.
Perhaps you're surprised or perhaps not by some of the answers that you're seeing.
3.4 billion people globally lack safely managed sanitation.
Again, the map here for visualization and please do sit down so that we get a reset of the numbers.
We'll move on to the third question.
Are you confident that you will not be evicted from your home? Do you have tenure security? Again, what does your cue card says? The numbers are changing, as you can tell.
You have land tenure security if you are safe in your house and if you are not worried to be evicted.
That may be because your house or neighborhood rather is demolished or because you do not have documents.
Interpret that as you will.
66% of the world's population perceive their rights to land as secure and 30-50% of urban residents in developing countries are estimated to lack any legal tenure documents for the land they occupy.
Next question, do you actually have the documents that prove and protect your tenure security either if you are the owner or the tenant of the house? Let's see the answers from those cue cards.
I can't believe that no one is standing up.
If it says that, sit down.
That's what the car says.
That's what the 9 million people you represent tell you.
Yet, as we know, formal documentation remains limited and of course, very unequal.
43% of adults possess official land tenure documents, but only 19% of adult population in least developed countries.
Is your rent affordable? Stand up to answer yes.
We all know that housing affordability is getting worse.
44% of the global population could afford rent in 2022, and this is a staggering figure.
If you spent no money on anything else, it would take a household 11.2 years of gross income to pay for acquiring a house.
That's if you spend every single dollar euro, whatever currency in your house.
Next one, you do not live in an informal settlement or a slum? What does your cue card say? It's interesting to see how the room changes with each question.
Also, some people have stood up for all of them, which I think is very, very telling.
I 1.1 0.6 billion rather of people currently living in informal settlements worldwide.
That's one in four every urban dwellers and very important to know that 350 to 500 million children live in slum households.
Then the map here where you can see the share of the urban population living in informal settlements.
These are the figures from 2024.
Overall, considering all of these factors, let's see now how many of you have access to adequate housing.
It's a final question.
And I really encourage you to look around the room.
2.9 billion people are currently living in inadequate housing conditions that can be manifested as homelessness, evictions, displacement caused by climate change and conflict or unsustainable costs, and also the inspection of informal settlements.
It was just a quick exercise that I think helps visualize a bit of the world.
Up to 2.9 billion people lack access to adequate housing, as we've been saying, and it is around 35% of the global population.
As you may have noticed, some of you never stood up.
And I'm really curious on if that made you feel left behind, how that made you feel? Because this is why forums like this are so important.
It's to accelerate universal access to adequate housing and to engage in these conversations with partners from around the globe.
If we do this exercise next time, I really hope that we see more people standing up throughout the exercise.
Let's try to visualize that for our target by 2030, ensure that everyone has access to safe and affordable housing and basic services.
Do you agree? Agree? Come on.
It was an interactive session.
I need something from the audience.
Do you agree or not? Excellent.
Thank you very much.
Thank you.
And I will hold you up to that on the next forum to see how the numbers have changed.
Well, now it's time for our first panel, the moment you've all been waiting for, where we'll be examining the housing crisis through several interconnected lenses, land, justice, inclusion, and of course, governance.
Our discussion will be exploring the structural forces shaping housing systems today from financing and affordability pressures to informal urban growth, exclusion, and unequal access to land and services.
We will also ask what it would mean to genuinely reorient housing systems around inclusion, human dignity, and participation.
So please join me in welcoming our panelists.
Jeffrey Sachs is the president of the UN Sustainable Development Solutions Network, an American economist and public policy analyst.
Mr.
Sacks is also University Professor and Director of the Center for Sustainable Development at Columbia University.
Colo Kasla is the UN Special Rapporteur on the right to adequate housing.
Mr.
Kasla is also senior lecturer into International Human Rights Law at Essex Law School and leads the Human Rights Local Project at a Human Rights Center.
Margarita Green is an architect and a professor at the Pontificia Universidad Catholic Chile and is also an associate researcher at the Center for Sustainable Urban Development Sos.
And Grace Siumum Tonga is the President of Habitat International Coalition, an independent nonprofit alliance with more than 450 organizations, social movements, and individuals dedicated to defending the human rights to housing, land, and a livable environment.
Now let's please welcome them properly all to the stage now that we have all four of you.
Hello.
Hi.
We are on.
Thank you very much, first of all, for participating in the session.
I was able to see you all standing up and sitting down throughout and I think it was a really interesting visual reminder of all the numbers we're trying to make sense.
Jeffrey, if I could begin with you.
What do you see as the principal economic and political forces shaping today's housing crisis globally? Why do many societies struggle to ensure affordable and adequate housing at scale? Thank you very much and thanks for a great session.
I like, especially the words holistic, integrated.
We're talking about complex systems, housing is part of the complexity of urban change and the urban economy, from my perspective is part of a global structural change.
I think we need to emphasize distinctions here like you just did with us standing up and sitting down.
Demography is very different now going forward.
Much of the world has already reached the peak of urban populations.
The question then will be upgrading housing, eliminating slum areas and so forth, but not increasing the urban population.
But there will be globally around 2 billion people added to cities in the next 25 years, mostly in Africa and in South Asia.
So we really need to make the distinction of places where there's going to be massive increases of population.
Huge cities emerging and those places that have stability or even decline in the urban population.
That's one fundamental difference.
Almost every map that we saw had S Sahan Africa as distinctive in this.
That's partly the poverty, it's partly the rapid increase of population that is still underway.
Africa's population will rise from right now about 1.4 billion people to 2.5 billion people by mid century.
So within that, we need to see the question of housing.
Then the questions are the increase or not of urban populations, the income levels, the jobs, the skills of the population, the design of the urban areas if they are growing, or the reform of urban design and structures if they are stable or even places of declining population.
I don't want to give any answers to all of that complexity except to say that we're really dealing not with a uniform global crisis.
We're really dealing with some very different dynamics in different parts of the world.
I would like us to put some focus on the challenges in Africa and what I think are lesser but very significant challenges remaining in South Asia and in Southeast Asia.
Koo, if I could bring you in here because I really am intrigued about the human rights perspective and how it can help us understand today's housing challenges.
Very much.
If I may, I'd like to say a thing or two about the mandates because I think that will be helpful.
I'm the United Nations Special Rapporteur on the rights to adequate housing.
This is my first month in the role, a role that I hope to hold for six years and because not everyone will be necessarily familiar with the role, I would like to explain what I do.
I came here particularly to learn and to connect.
I will share some ideas, but what I really want to do is to meet civil society groups, government officials and hear from you about your priorities and where human rights can make a difference.
I So as the UN Special Rapporteur on the right to adequate housing, I have particularly three missions, three roles.
The first one is to push the boundaries of international human rights law, identifying themes that are of global relevance, where human rights are at stake.
So to give you a sense, previous holders of the role have focused on the impact that the financialization of housing has on On the right to housing, a right that is recognized in international human rights law signed and ratified by the vast majority, if not all countries in the world.
Also, there's been research on the impact of the issue of affordability of housing and the impact that it has on access to the right to housing and other rights.
Or domicte the systematic and deliberate destruction of homes at war.
That's the first function.
The first function is thematic focus, pushing the boundaries of international law.
The second one is country reports.
I am mandated by the United Nations Human Rights Council to visit at least one country per year, meet with government officials, with civil society, with people going through evictions, homelessness, and then present recommendations and conclusions to the government in question.
And to the United Nations.
So if there is a government representative in the room and they would like to issue an invitation for the special rapporteur to visit, you know where to find me.
And then thirdly is receive communications, receive submissions really of people from anywhere in the world who have concerns about the right to housing, people who are going through mass evictions, people who are concerned about certain legal initiatives in their countries, indigenous communities that are denied access to land use, any example of abuse of the right to housing, they can submit a complaint to the United Nations and myself and my team, we will deal with it and we will raise it with the government in question and present recommendations and follow it up.
What would be the added value of human rights? Because that's a question and I finish with this.
The first one is the principle of nondiscrimination, which is a cross cutting principle in international human rights law.
The idea of not leaving anyone behind and focusing on those who are particularly at risk.
Then accountability.
Human rights after all is about accountability.
Countries do not need to sign and ratify treaties, they voluntarily do so in exercise of their sovereignty, and they are international mechanisms, the, the UN Special porte on housing is the only international mechanism devoted entirely to the right to housing to hold states to account and ensure that they comply with these standards.
Maximum available resources, states are supposed to mobilize the maximum available resources, public and private to satisfy all social rights, including the right to housing.
Non regression, meaning that if you reach a certain level of advancement in the protection of the right to housing, there is an expectation that governments will not take steps backwards, and if they do, we need to hold them to account.
Then finally, the adequacy criteria.
The international human rights law is very helpful in providing us, researchers, campaigners, and states certain tools to assess whether the provisional housing is adequate as we saw in the graph, whether there security of tenure, whether it's affordability, accessibility, and so on, cultural adequacy.
That's also part of the frame of the rights to adequaate housing.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Margarita, to turn now to the pace of rapid urbanization and the current patterns we're seeing of urban development.
How are you seeing it reshape the challenges in cities today? Thank you very much for your question, which I really liked.
Very happy to be here with this wonderful audience.
I really liked your question that I said because I feel that those two things that you mentioned, the urban development and the rapid urbanization process are two things that really shape in a different way the housing challenges.
In that respect, I want to remember a bit what Elisa said before.
He said, what are we doing wrong? Well, I forgot to present myself.
I'm an architect and an urbanist, so I really care about the solutions.
I think the question is very good with what are we doing wrong? As an academic, that's our job to see the world and try to understand it and then propose something better.
I would say that we We're doing many things wrong, of course, but what I think is the worst part is that we're not understanding the current changes.
You see the urbanization process before for many years was people coming from the rural areas to the cities, who were big families, they were coming to find the opportunities of the city.
But nowadays and those were the ones that were creating the housing challenge, let's say, nowadays, it's a very different group.
It's not just big families, it is people that already live in the city, but they're not able to access to a good house.
Those are demanding the houses today.
Even more, we have in many places that they are not really urban people that were living that places, many times immigrants immigrants that are coming from other places and looking for better opportunities because they had to abandon the places, et cetera Again, that's a completely different group.
Nowadays also with the demographic change, we know that families are much smaller.
I don't know, in Latin America, we have 20% in the recent census of one person household.
Can you understand that? It's a very different solution that you need when you have one person households.
In the pandemia, we realized that they were very unsustainable and even two people household.
In my country in Chile, we recently did the last census.
When I was young, it was five people household, the mean.
Today, it was 2.8.
So the reduction is enormous, and we all know that we're getting older, the population.
So the solutions that we're doing today have to be completely different.
What is happening today? We have people that are living in the house that do not have access, and we have migrants.
They are completely different people.
They have higher levels of education than the previous urban rural dwellers that are coming to the city.
My because the time is very short, what I would like to suggest for you to look at the four scales of the housing challenge, which I understand it as house, neighborhood, city, and territory.
Each one of those changes completely and gives a completely different shape to the challenges from that previous population to the contemporary population.
In Latin America, it is very different in all the world.
I don't know all the cases.
The case I deal more is my region.
For example, the houses today, they're much smaller, they're older, they don't have so many children.
It's a different house.
Neighborhood.
Latin America has a tradition of a great community.
It has always been the network for the vulnerable groups.
You have your community, your neighbor, if you have problems, they help you.
Communities now have lots of problem because when the state abandons a place, the problem is like informal settlements, when the state leaves informal settlements and doesn't act on them, there's not a vacuum there.
Other groups organized criminal groups, many times take them.
What we have there is very bad.
There's no place many times and social cohesion has gone down in a very quick way.
That's the neighborhoods.
Neighborhoods have been vulnerate because of this, you have more what was previous a vulnerability of scarcity of poverty.
Today is a vulnerability of unsafety and violence, which is very difficult to see.
And then at city level, at city level in Latin America, we've approached it in many ways.
I think we've done very good work not that it's completely answered, but for example, we have the answers of Medin, we have the answers of Bogota.
I don't know if you know about them, but we have these care blocks that they're building at neighborhoods also.
There's a lot to do there.
The city has to become available to everybody, and we cannot do that if we do not have a good transport system.
Then territory, Well, at territory level, we have all the climate change, all the areas of risk, et cetera, I know you know that.
I know that I'm just reminding you because all the audience here knows about these problems.
But the idea the academy can do is to try and order them and learn from what we already know.
Like the question that the lady there said before, indigenous populations for example.
They have a lot to teach us according to how to treat the territory because the land now is not infinite.
We have difficult land to conquer.
We have to build inside the areas that need renewal.
I leave it here because I think I'm running out of time seeing your seeing my look.
What does that mean? I thought I was being nice.
Well, I want to stay on that point of making sure that our cities are accessible to all to bring grace into the conversation because I really want to ask you about what are the main barriers that you are seeing preventing housing systems from serving everyone and I guess especially the most vulnerable communities.
Yeah.
Thank you so much.
Basically, when we look at the main barriers that are actually preventing housing systems, The first question we ask ourselves is to have an analysis of the times that we're actually living in.
We are living in difficult times and we have also been fraught by geopolitical global context, which has been marked by increased privatization of housing, land, as well as basic services and public goods.
We have seen very little control, but much of the services are actually profit oriented because they are serving the interests of the investors.
We've also seen a shrinking space for civil society and concentration of power in the hands of the few.
We all know that most of the policies, systems, structures favor government interests and political interests.
Then we have seen a blind eye on the aspect of indigenous knowledge.
Coming from HIC, I think you heard when I was being called to the stage.
HIC actually commends the focus of WUF13.
It's concentrated and centered on housing, land, and basic services, which is in line with the original mandate of UN Habitat.
One thing that stands out for us from Habitat International Coalition and UN habitat is that 2026 is actually a milestone year.
Because both Hick and you inhabitat are actually celebrating 50 years.
But then the question we should ask ourselves is, is it at 50 that we should be talking about inequalities? Certainly not.
This trajectory actually reminds us of how we need to actually look at the housing crisis.
This is not new, but it's actually getting worse and worse by the day.
Allow me now to move on to the main barriers that are actually causing this housing crisis.
Most of them are actually social and environmental, whereby we have seen profitability actually being prioritized, private sector interests.
We also see a trend of beautification of cities and territories, change of land use for each to be a business area.
Over prioritizing the aspect of human rights, and this trend has actually also created the urban invisibles.
It also overlooks the aspect of natural environments.
Why do I say so? We actually see this expressed through forced evictions, which other speakers have already spoken to displacements either due to development.
We know that mostly the secondary cities and metropolitan cities because of them being economic hubs, they tend to displace people from the original homes.
We've also seen climate change induced disasters, conflict, occupation, and war.
The other aspect actually that is contributing to this housing crisis it's financialization and commodification of housing.
We know that housing is a fundamental right, but at the moment, we are dealing with issues of unaffordability in certain places unregulated short term rentals, as well as changing housing areas for tourist purposes.
Amongst the other things that we have also noticed is the lack of support and recognition for social production of habitat practices.
For instance, the aspect of community led, collective and non market based housing, the indigenous knowledge that we have deliberately decided to ignore.
The most vulnerable communities are actually disapproportionately affected by discrimination and these strands along gender, race, class, physical ability, and age, among others.
And lastly, HEC and its members have actually identified some opportunities in relation to these barriers.
There is need to actually advance the social production of habitats, and this is in line with the new Urban agenda.
Look at paragraph 31 and 46.
Social production of habitat actually needs to be recognized.
We also need to be deliberate about preventing and combating forced evictions.
This again is actually in line with paragraph 31, 107, and 111 of what is in the Urban agenda.
However, what is missing, again, which also acts as a factor contributing to the housing crisis, is that the human rights aspect is missing, which looks at the aspect of reparation and remedy should people face forced evictions.
Thank you.
Thank you, Grace.
I want to pick up on the challenge that Aldo made to any government officials who might be in the room and actually ask you what would it mean in practice for governments to treat housing primarily as a right? There are plenty of challenges indeed.
I think the first one is perhaps a provocation here, but let's stop talking about housing as a market.
Housing is not a market.
Housing shouldn't be a financialized asset.
We will then talk about education, health as markets or perhaps some wood but many of us will raise our eyebrows.
Let's raise our eyebrows if we hear housing market.
It is not a market, but it is an investment.
It is an investment in our future.
As individuals, as citizens and in the future of our countries and the future of our children.
The second observation is that this idea of security of tenure, which is an essential requirement of adequate housing.
Security of tenure means that people need to feel safe where they live irrespective of their legal title.
That doesn't mean that evictions can never happen under no circumstances.
There are certain legal requirements for it, but there must be security of flashy urban projects that promise massive regenerations and economic development in our country do not justify an eviction of an entire community when the community doesn't have anywhere to go.
Then climate, obviously, climate change is one of the challenges.
Climate change is an existential challenge for the whole of humanity, but not for everyone equally.
There are geographical differences, there are geopolitical differences, there are class based differences.
So our human rights based approach and a housing rights approach to climate requires social protection and requires egalitarian principles when we tackle climate change.
A fourth issue to highlight will be the disrespect that we are observing to international law by many governments that have historically been democratic that nonetheless are breaching deliberately international standards, committing attacks, committing genocides, committing domides, the deliberate and systematic destruction of the homes in armed conflict, and we need to call it out.
Now, there are many priorities.
Thank you.
There are many priorities and as a special rapporteur, I'd like to discuss them in a session I'm going to have on Thursday at 12 with civil society, but I'm going to propose four for Monday for the beginning of my mandate.
I will just mention them.
The first one is I want to learn from cities and local communities.
I want to get over the barrier, the limits that states sometimes are unable or unwilling to implement the right to housing.
I want to put in the forefront the good practices that local authorities are doing in different countries and local communities are doing at the local level.
The second one is something that I'm pleased to hear from your inhabitat that the social and environmental function of land or property is one of the issues.
It must be one of the issues.
We need to talk about property.
We need to talk about how we regulate property in a democratic way as including private property, as a means of fulfilling the right to housing for all, particularly those who need it the most.
Thirdly, I think a lot of you raised right at the start, you said housing is health.
Indeed, housing is a social determinant of health.
Meaning that good housing conditions for people who need the most are going to be good for them, but are going to be good for the whole of society.
It's an investment in the country's future is proven without a doubt that good housing policies result in reduction of health inequalities and an improvement of health outcomes in society as a whole.
Good housing policies are good for everyone, including for those who don't get public housing directly.
Then, the fourth issue is the issue of housing in context.
We need to talk about housing not only in terms of a block of flats or a house here and there.
We need to talk about the networks, about the connections, about the infrastructure, about the roads, about the environmental conditions, about access, how easy it is for me to get to leisure to get to work.
We need to talk about the housing in its community sense, and that's something I want to highlight in my mandate as well.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Margarita, staying on this point of governance and this time turning to urban governance rather, I want to get your perspective on the changes that you think we need to see in urban governance and informal settlements transformation that are needed to create these more integrated and inclusive cities that we've been discussing.
Thank you very much.
Well, I think the most important thing that we've learned is that it is not the case of one size fits all.
I definitely we need situated knowledge on every place to really get good housing policies.
Informal settlements has to be part of the housing policy.
It's not a separate issue.
It has to be part of it.
But I would say that the message should be more than anything to have multiple solutions, all sorts of solutions, houses, flats, buildings, even sprawl, houses with gardens for families.
Multiple sectors have to be involved.
That means not only housing, public works, transport, health, education have to be involved in the solution.
Multiple actors, the communities, the local authorities, the public sector, et cetera, civil society, and multiple scales, as I was saying.
The answer definitely has to go from the house, community, neighborhood, and city.
Of course, the message there is that it is very complicated to deal with so many multiplicity of sectors, actors, scales, et cetera.
At the same time, when it is a right, we all know, it's also a commodity, we all know as well.
The governance is really complicated there.
I don't want to dwell so much in it, but especially that in countries like in South America, governments change and they not always follow the same policy.
I'll leave it at that.
Jeffrey, let's then turn very good follow up from Margaret intervention to the economic policy.
I guess I'm curious about what shifts do you think we need to see in order to achieve everything we've been talking about about making housing systems more inclusive.
I want to excuse me, emphasize one more time how different the contexts are in different parts of the world.
When Margarita talks about the move now for smaller households and so forth, that's very much a Latin American phenomenon.
The urban population in Chile will be stable for the next 25 years.
In Sub Saharan Africa, the urban population is going to more than double.
In fact, it that raises a completely different set of questions in terms of urban space, land, design, construction, completely different set of issues, and of course, in a completely different economic context as well.
So I think it would help us to clarify these issues by asking what is the same in urban settings and what is distinctive.
Certain things are the same.
All over the world, cities will become more green and digital in the technologies that they use.
All over the world, cities will be relying more on electricity based transport.
Clearly, all over the world, there will be issues of inequality of rich and poor.
That's true in every society.
All over the world, cities will need to be grappling with environmental stresses.
So climate adaptation is pretty much a universal need.
But then come all these differences of whether you're expanding the urban population dramatically, whether you're operating in the context of low income or middle income or high income, whether you're operating in very different economic challenges where there are well established institutional frameworks of housing finance, which is true in almost all of the high income world and where there are issues to be sure, but they're not the most central issues, whereas it's very, very different in low income and lower middle income settings where half the world population lives.
I think it would really help us to keep the typologies distinct because the challenges are very, very distinct.
Certain problems are similar, they resonate, some are absolutely common related to technological change and ecological challenges, although the specific ecological challenges are different, but some are very different demographically, spatially, and in terms of the underlying income base for the urban area.
You can't solve urban problems if you don't have an underlying economy that's functioning.
In some places you do, but you still have urban problems that are social or technological or ecological in nature.
But in other places, the most fundamental challenge is the economic base that is going to support a rapidly growing urban population.
One thing I'll say about S Saran Africa that's extremely important to note, urban populations will rise no matter what happens to the overall macroeconomy, because the rural areas are going to be mechanized, the children will leave the farm areas today or the rural areas for cities.
This is inevitable.
The question is, it is inevitable.
But the question is whether they are going to be jobs, what the infrastructure is going to be what the infrastructure is going to look like, and those are very powerful forces at play right now.
I see people shaking their head.
I'd be happy to discuss it and debate it.
But Africa will not be rural in 25 years.
It will not be, and so this is going to be a very different scene and we better prepare adequately for that.
Thank you.
I'm afraid the clock is against us, but Grace, I really want to come to you at the end, but I'm going to give you a really tough challenge of trying to keep it to a minute or less, which I know is very unfair, but I really want to come to you before we wrap up the session.
But we've been talking so much about the importance of human centric visions when it comes to tackling the housing crisis.
I guess I really wanted to end this panel by asking you about how can governments and institutions housing solutions with communities rather than for communities? Yes.
The starting point is recognizing the local communities and civil society organizations that are actually working in these communities as legitimate partners.
Remember that the people that live in these communities understand their challenges.
In that regard, the community members themselves have to be part of the solution.
Only in that way are we going to make sure that actually we address the aspect of providing housing together with the communities.
And I think very quickly, the other aspect is the establishment of public community partnerships that actually advance co production, core management, and the core management looks at different models, the cooperative model, as well as the aspect of core management of SLM upgrading programs.
And for instance, for us at HIC, We believe that in everything that needs to be done, the community members have to be part of the decision making processes, the designing, including at the point when policies and systems are developed to actually advance the aspect of provision of housing for all.
Just driving on what Jeffrey said, there will be different classes in every society.
But what is required is to make sure that When a product, be it housing or service is being developed, you make sure that the people that should benefit from this product are part of the process, including the decision making.
Community members should also influence the policy framing, as well as the aspect of data.
We need adequate data, demographics that should inform every decision that is made, including policies.
Thank you.
Thank you.
I'll let you have those extra seconds.
What a fantastic panel and I'm sure these conversations will continue beyond here.
But for now, please join me in thanking them for their amazing contributions.
Thank you so much.
Thank you.
You can do.
Thank you.
Our second panel will, of course, build on what needs to change to discuss how can governments, financial institutions, private sector, and development actors scale solutions that work.
But first, and please you can leave.
Thank you.
But first, we've been hearing all about housing being at the center of social and economic development.
And about its importance as well as a human rights, something we've been saying from the very start of the session this morning.
We also heard about housing in relation to planning, to governance, informal settlements, transformation, and of course, social inclusion.
Yet when we think about our house, our home, we probably think about it in very, very different terms.
We think about, where we grew up playing, where our grandmother was cooking for us, where we spend our free time with our loved ones, where we return after a long trip.
Housing is closely linked with our emotional well being, with our culture, and ultimately with who we are and with our identity.
Our neighborhoods, our communities shape and represent who we all are.
To give us this perspective, it's my pleasure to invite Mr.
Fouad Akunov, a researcher who will speak to us about housing, culture and identity, and architectural and historic perspective of Baku.
Thank you.
You have the click.
There you go.
Thanks.
Ladies and gentlemen, it is my most pleasure to address such an honorable audience.
I have to admit from the very outset that unlike the previous honorable panelists, I'm not an expert in the field of urban planning.
I'm a amateur researcher who is going to share some of outcomes of my private research for over 30 years in the field of housing culture and personal identity in the context of architectural and historic perspective of Banku.
A city that hosts this very important event in the city that really brings together various cultures and lifestyles, both in its architecture and its image and its history and its past.
I hope I will have more opportunity in the days to come to elaborate in more details on how a tiny little citadel with estimated 2000 years of history but only 14.5 thousand residents in 18 72, when the oil boom started in Bku changed into a rapidly growing urban center of the whole South Caucasus and a place where East and West are coming together in a very harmonious manner because when people ask me, is Bku Europe or Asia, my answer is usually French.
I say San D Pan.
It depends on which side of the wall you are.
When you're inside the old wall of Bku, you're in Asia.
When you step outside, it's a city that used to be called the tiny Paris of the Caucasus due to its absolutely flamboyant development at the times of oil boom, when in 1901, Bku was making half of the world's output in crude.
And that really changed the image of the city, a tiny little citadel that used to be a transit trade center and one of the branches of the Great Silk Route, all of a sudden became first an industrial hub and then an enormously important cultural center that brought together people of very various origins and backgrounds that somehow found a modest vivendi in this absolutely new setting.
So what really changed the image of Baku were the local oil tycoons.
The people who amassed fortunes and they flaunted their enormous wealth into the streets of Bangu outside the O wall, and they created a city that really was called Tiny Paris of the Caucasus.
Interesting enough, we have the pictures of four of them like Hajizn Abden Tgv, Mussinaagv, Shamsa Sedulav and Mocha Muktaov local oil barons.
Well, we had companies like the Nobels R Rothschilds in Baku, who created an industrial revolution, but it were really the local oil barons who on a number of occasions were not only uneducated, but just illiterate But they really changed the image.
They were visionaries.
For instance, the first of the people you see in the row of the pictures, Tagv was a man who never could write down his name.
But he was asking one simple question which still is valid.
Why are the Muslim nations behind? The only answer we could find was uneducated woman.
He said, uneducated woman is an uneducated mother.
What can she give to her kids? He said, if you want to educate your nation, start with girls because by educating a boy, sorry, gentlemen, you get one educated person.
By educating a girl, you educate a family.
The guy couldn't write down his name.
Yet, he created a difference.
The other one Musar was a very stingy guy who could donate three rubles to an orphanage when his son was lavishly giving 100 and when Pio said, How come? The richest person, you give only three rubles when your son is giving 100 as well.
My son is a son of an oil barn he can afford doing that.
I am a son of a peasant.
What do you want from me? But it was the son of a peasant who created the Baku by investing tons of money into absolutely beautiful houses because he didn't want to depend on oil.
He was investing in real estate, but hiring an excellent Polish architect, Joseph Kloska who really brought a new style in tobacco like art nouveau.
Well, each of these oil barrens has its own feature, and I will try to elaborate more on that in the days to come.
But what they really created, they changed the image of the city.
And having this nucleus of the old citadel, which today is a part of Unes's cultural heritage, Baku accrued an outer part of the city where the houses were built like in Venice.
Look at the, the top pictures when you can see the building of the Muslim charitable Association of Baku, by the way, donated by the stingy oil Barn who with all these millions lost his only son to tuberculosis.
And Mai didn't save his only son, this stingy guy built this absolutely magnificent building of the local charitable association that houses the Academy of Sciences today and look at this building in Bku and the atara in Venice, or look at Baku's casino, which now is the Philharmonic Hall and look at the famous casino in Monte Carlo.
In one street in Bku you could see a piece of Venice, a piece of Monte Carlo, or another palace that was built by an oil barn just because his darling wife loved something similar in Europe.
He could build the same thing for her in Bku.
By the way, the prototype in Berlin is no longer standing.
The palace in Bku houses the wedding hall today.
Look, but even trying to replicate this European architecture, they would never do a copy paste in Bku because there were some local traditions that the architects managed to abide.
Speaking of the architects, Well, I have to admit, there was a phenomenon of Polish architects in Bku because enormous growth of the city at the time of the oil boom resulted in a situation when not a single ethnic community exceeded 36% of the population.
At that time, Bku could speak of phenomenon of Jewish lawyers and doctors, German technicians and engineers, and last but not least, Polish architects.
Why Polish? Because Poland was another part of Russian Empire, which we used to be a part too.
And educated Polish architects, graduates of Petersburg Institute of Civil Engineers having very nice background.
They couldn't really display themselves in a way they had an opportunity in Baku.
On the one hand, you had enormous money.
On the other hand, you had ambitions and this illiterate local oil barons were hiring Polish architects to design their mansions, plus they were training local architects as well.
You had unbelievable local workforce because what makes Bku so specific is this impeccable sandstone the city is built off.
Egyptian pyramids are built of the similar stone.
The desert around Baku provided enormous quantities of this beautiful sandstone that local people were really good in carving it and some of the visitors used to report.
The stone masons in Baku are born with chisels in their hands.
Poor guys never had toys and the only construction materials they had access to was sandstone, so they were taking maximum benefit out of the minimum they had and the Polish architects were smart in using this tradition of impeccable stone carving.
But Well, apart from Polish architects, as German architects like Nicholas Von Derna, who by the way, was one of the first authors of the city plan of Barku or Adolf Eichler, who was the architect of Barkus Lutheran Church that is still operating to this very day.
But Speaking of the local oil barons, we also trained a cohort of local architects paying for their education in Petersburg and abroad and there was the first Azerbijani graduate of Peterburg Institute of Civil Engineer Zebkhmedakov, followed by a tandem of absolutely unbelievable local architects like Mikhail Husseinavan Sadik Nadasev who at the times of Stalin empire style, used to make this magnanimic Soviet architecture enormously site specific bearing in mind these centuries old traditions of beautiful stonework in Balku, there were some unbelievable construction companies like a constructor invited from Helsinki, Finland, Aleksander Dubov or local constructors, Kasuov Brothers, who were really channeling these enormous funds of the local oil barons and their ambitions and the visionary views of the architects into what creates the beauty of Balku today.
But altogether, the architecture of the oil boom we're speaking about and the time of oil boom started in 1870s and it was lasting all the way to 1920 when the Communist took over in Baku and within this less than half of the century, the whole city was created that we're really proud of today.
But the architecture of oil Boom Baku bears the impact of its time because you could speak of architects.
You could speak of local stone masons, you can speak of all these other constructors and so on and so forth.
By the way, there was a very interesting thing.
The local stone masons were very proficient in crafting stones, but there was something they could never do.
They were Muslims.
Islam prohibits figurative art.
Yet it was the local oil barons, dominantly of Azerbijani local origin, who were trying to build their houses in European style.
The missing thing was that the local stone masons were not trained to make figures or faces because those are prohibited in both Islam and Judaism.
Creations of the Lord cannot be repeated by the Lord's creation.
What the oil barons did, they invited an Italian sculptor from Vjui, which is not far from Venice, António Franzi.
He was training local artists and artisans to make figures from the sketches drawn on paper, so the architecture of Baku became enormously sculptural and what was plastered or molded in other parts of former Russian Empire or even the Caucasus was chiseled and carved into sandstone in Baku, which made this architecture enormously durable and capable to withstand decades of Soviet negligence in the years to come.
But with that all, you can speak of architects, you can speak of stone masons, you can speak of all the participants.
But the major figure is He who makes the order, the customer and the customer was Nuvera rich.
Not in a bad sense of this word.
Like I told you, most of the local oil barons were incapable to write down their names, but they knew one thing for sure, render the God what is God's and render the Caesar what is Caesar's.
They were bringing good architects.
They were training local architects.
But when they were telling the architects of what they wanted, these people didn't know the names of styles.
So the order could sound in a very interesting manner.
I want to have entrance like in this guy's house and the dome like in that guy's house and the balcony like in the third guy's house and something of my own.
The latter to be underlined.
So this something of my own made the architecture of Banku enormously personalized.
There is a saying that dogs are looking like their owners or owners looking like their dogs in Baku, it was the houses looking like their owners.
This eclectic style was enormously site specific.
I was not being an architect, I can dare to say so that I was always claiming for the term of Bakus eclectic style.
Yes, it's eclectic, but it is so site specific.
It is so beautifully performed in the fine local sandstone and it tells you the message of the owners.
Look at the picture in the middle.
A nice, elegant owner Isabek Kazinski and the beautiful mansion he built.
For his family, a place where Charles De Gaulle would spend a night on his way to Moscow through Baku in 1944 to meet Joseph Stalin, or the same famous Motzn Muktaov who built a gorgeous palace for his wife just because she loved something similar in Europe.
Proud and tough look and stature of the owner is reflected in his palace where he committed suicide, where two armed Soviet army soldiers entered the palace on horseback and it killed them both and then turned a pistol on himself.
His wife had to evacuate from Baku, but the palace is still there housing the wedding hall or Dmitry Mitrofanov a sturdy tough Russian oil barn who came from Pern and amassed fortune in Bacu and his house is looking like a rock.
The similarity between the owners and houses is something that truly makes Bacu stand out.
I happen to show that to one very talented poet, Aleksander Gardnsky.
He was so much inspired by the similarity of owners and homes that he made a poem that I tried to translate for today's meeting.
The poem is in Russian, but it sounds nice in English too.
The wind of Baku harshly blowing, its message straight and getting through.
Old mansions look like their owners.
The semblance is so deep and true.
The flavor of their past and glory is clear, eloquent and strong.
One mansion seems to come from Venice, the other sturdy as the owner, it sometimes happened to belong.
An anthem to its time and epic performed in everlasting stone, tells magic stories of their owners through decades after they are gone.
This anthem in stone is what Baku presents today, and I'm happy to represent the city that houses such an important meeting.
Thank you so very much and I look forward to meeting you in the days to come.
Thank you.
Thank you so much.
Thank you so much for what a passionate whistle stop tour through the history of Baku and its architecture.
Thank you so much for translating the poem for us too.
It really summarized everything that you've been describing about this amazing city.
Now, it is time for our second panel and as mentioned, we will be building on the diagnosis and priorities.
The first panel that we've been discussing and turning to more practical questions.
How do we scale solutions that actually work? Join me in welcoming our panelists.
Her Excellency, Edna Vega is the Minister of Agrarian urban and territorial Development in Mexico.
Please join us onstage.
She's a sociologist and urban planner and leads the National Housing Initiatives, territorial Planning and and regularization programs.
In Magge is the Vice President for housing at Kaisha in Brazil.
She is a sociologist with over 25 years of experience in management and public policy, particularly in the areas of housing and urban development.
Matthew Baldwin is the head of the Housing Task Force at the European Commission.
He has served in the commission for over 25 years and has a strong experience of working with cities in different dimensions and is a passionate believer in their capacity to deliver change for their citizens.
António Capagnoli is the world president of Ypsi, the International Real Estate Federation, where he brings more than 20 years of experience across legal, financial, and real estate sectors together to lead the Federation's global community.
And Jonathan Reckford is the CEO of Habitat for Humanity, a global Christian housing organization that has helped more than 65 million people construct, rehabilitate, or preserve their homes.
Thank you.
Thank you all for joining me onstage and thanks tech team for dealing with the mic change without any announcement.
Thank you.
Some of the addresses and answers will be in Spanish.
If you do need a headset, our volunteers at the back will have them ready for you.
Thank you all very much for joining us.
Edna, if I could start with you.
I would like to ask you about the urban poor who are disproportionately affected by housing inequalities concentrated in informal settlements and excluded from housing finance.
What solutions have proved effective at scale in addressing such challenges? Thank you.
Thank you very much.
I believe that previous conditions give us a very good context of the topic.
It is a very complicated topic.
I believe there are no unique answers, and it is a little bit shocking to me, to be honest, to see that we are talking about housing crisis.
I've been working on this for 40 years.
I've gone to different regional, international, national forum, and we talk about housing crisis on a permanent basis.
On a daily basis, I believe that this housing crisis turns into something very different.
When we conduct an international analysis, we see that and I agree with what you've said.
I agree with what our colleague said.
I believe that we have to be very specific in order to tackle the problem.
And Well, I can speak on behalf of Mexico and I can share some of the discussions that we've had regarding solutions for Latin America in different spaces.
During the introduction when Claudia was saying, are you aware as countries of the situation related to the housing situation at a global level.
It seems like something very simple, but it's actually a provocation.
Why? Because we are aware of the number of people, millions, billions of people suffering from this housing deficit, millions of people who are homeless, millions of people who live in informal settlements.
In Mexico, we call them irregular settlements.
Of course, we have to be aware of that.
But we have to pay attention to alternatives, proposals in such inadequate situations.
What can I say about that? Well, I can share the experience that I've gathered over the past seven years in Mexico.
I'll put it simply.
I'll share a powerful sentence from the Mexican government.
The port come first and that's for everyone's sake.
What does that mean? Well, it's related to that vision that tries to move away from housing being a property.
Towards a solution that includes details such as paying attention to the most vulnerable.
This change of vision will transform the economic model, the territorial model as well, and it's link to the society itself.
I believe that this depends on a strong political will.
This implies a different financing instruments and legal toolkits that should be given to that specific vulnerable population.
I believe that if we do so, everyone will benefit from it, communities, cities, et cetera In is here because obviously hearing the example here from Mexico, but I also wanted to turn for example from Brazil, which has successfully delivered large scale housing programs.
I wanted to hear from you on what were the key financial and institutional factors that drove this and how did you maintain affordability and efficiency while navigating through bureaucracy too? Now, Well, thank you very much for the invitation.
I'd like to share a very important message, and for that, I'm going to join my colleague Jeffrey Sachs.
I believe that this depends on the country we're talking about.
In Brazil, for instance, The country is big, but is still developing.
Then I'd like to talk about democracy.
Emilia was clear about that.
This is very important when it comes to facing the housing crisis and other social crisis of our time.
Brazil has gone through democratic reforms within the government and housing is not just an economic development component, but it also contributes to reducing social and territorial inequalities.
Public investments have been high and we have developed an institutional and financial architecture from K Kasia, which is where I come from, a public bank, which has played a very important role.
We've been financing 8.4 million households since the program was created.
The program is called Mi Casa Mi Viva My House, My Life, and it was created 15 years ago.
We foresee a big investment and a very important mechanism in Brazil.
The use of an investment fund created for workers which has a lower cost to that in the market and that allow us to reduce financial tension for families with maybe one or two minimum wages.
This reduces the need to use our savings.
We've got public resources and we're using them.
Let me be very clear.
In the global South, We cannot talk about social housing if we do not talk about grants.
Grants for social housing are very important in Brazil.
We have many different mechanisms in place as well intended for medium income workers and the ideas to make them more accessible.
This mechanism has allowed for us for many years to keep the program running.
We've done a lot of partnership with communities and with social movements, In order to make housing part of the community and the social movements as well.
To bring you into this conversation, what role does the commission play in addressing the regulatory and fiscal aspects of the housing market? Well, thank you very much.
Good morning, everyone.
It's wonderful to be here for this really vibrant discussion and a wonderful chance for us from Europe to hear stories from Mexico and from Brazil and elsewhere and we really welcome that.
You've heard my boss Danielson on the screen, so I won't repeat everything he said.
That would be catastrophic for your listening to me.
But just to say, very simply, what I think is a common factor is a deep and profound sense of affordable housing crisis in the European Union and across the world.
And especially, of course, in cities where we polled, it's the biggest issue confronting individuals in cities and especially for the young and the vulnerable and the homeless, where, again, housing is the issue or top three issues.
The sense that we have profoundly in Europe, and here I want to pick up a bit what Colo Kessler said about housing markets, is that the markets are not functioning for people.
Too many people, and this is a new factor are not finding their affordability in the existing housing markets.
Whether housing markets exist or whether it's a market failure or a policy failure and we could argue about that, it doesn't matter.
We have an issue here and as you said, Amelia at the start, what's not working and as this session is entitled, what's the plan the hot political topic confront our leaders is, let's put the elephant in the room up in lights that we are confronting anger.
And I don't think I'm exaggerating that we confront the challenges to our democracy and our social stability, our cohesion if we can't find solutions for people.
Now, picking up on what Jeffrey Sachs said and Es remarked on this about diversity, totally agree.
Even within the European Union, where you might think that from outside, it's a homogeneous group of rather wealthy countries, we have 27 member states, 27 housing markets, 27 sets of housing policies and we need to reflect that and understand that.
But again, here I disagree within that massive diversity, there is a sense of common purpose and the significant thing if we get this right is that leaders now for the first time are ready to make housing and particularly affordable housing a political priority to say, we will be judged on this by our voters.
That ladies and gentlemen, gives all of our cities, governments, international organizations, agency to make housing the significant thing which we hope it can become.
What are we doing about it in Europe? I'll be very, very brief, but there are some things we're doing on the regulatory side and on the simplification side.
We're coming forward shortly with an Affordable Housing Act to try to give cities the legal space in which they need to act against things like short term rentals, against things like non primary use of residences.
We're hearing that across the board and at the moment, it's legally questionable inside the U.
We want to give them more legal certainty.
We're also trying to simplify things, including at the European level.
We could all look at our legislation, whether European, national, regional or local and say, what could we do more simply to try to squeeze those timetables for not just new construction, but renovating, repurposing, densification, bringing new housing back into the markets.
Last but not least, and I'm sure Jonathan will say more about this.
Really with a tough and pragmatic look to bringing financing into the housing market.
We cannot do it all, ladies and gentlemen, I challenge you with this with public money.
All the public money in the world would never be enough.
We need to find a clever way to crowd in private finance, that patient responsible capital, not looking for a fast buck, not looking to be part of the growing speculation and financialization to support affordable housing for everybody.
In this, let's take a hard look at our vacant building stock.
20% across the European Union in all these overheated housing markets stands vacant.
That's a scandal, that's something we all need to get after and we're determined to do so.
How can we do so with our pan European investment platform, pragmatic toolkits looking at different ways using taxation, looking at different ways we look at capital gains tax.
There are many different arrows in our quiver and for the first time, I think we've got housing as a priority issue.
Let's take the bull by the horns and challenge it.
Thank you.
Thank you.
A perfect segue to bring in António because we keep talking about the importance of getting the private sector to be an active partner in these conversations.
What are the conditions that are needed for that to really advance and to really become true? To synthesize is trust between public and private and the third parties.
I represent to today the International research Federation gathering about Association, developers, brokers, managers, and advisors.
I truly believe that we want to be part to better the housing.
It's very important for the market, and I believe that the trust between public and private and the tour sector is the base.
What I see in the European community where I come from Italy, one of the model is not the solution, but is the public partnership agreement.
Find a perspective of 30 20, maybe even more, but it's difficult agreement where it's not only facing the construction.
Sometimes in the past, we're facing how much units we can build.
In Europe, first of all, we need to also understand as before we said, we shricking about population.
It's also about refurbish the construction that we already made in the past.
But I think the most based on the trust that the public sector and the public really get along with the same needs.
One of the I feel really inside this matter about what I call five P, private, public people policy partnership.
I tell you, also the big finance, and I spoke about some months ago in the Italian Parliament can helps a lot.
But I trust also in sortal finance.
I believe as we built in the past our church, our hospital in the 80 centers, where you enter in the hospital, you find a lot of people on the walls.
I strongly believe that the participation today of the social community in what we call urban Achon at the beginning to co projecting.
I speak in a little bit technical way.
When you crowd fund the SPV, the vehicle that put through the agreement between the public, the state and the private, we can engage the population with the right to speak about that project for 30 years, not one day.
This is also the risking the bad use of that housing in the future.
Because today housing is not only housing what we said in the past, like before, but it is also neat bogs.
I truly believe that is very important to make housing, but it is also important to make a soccer field, a place where the kids can go to school and so the infrastructure.
But it is also important to my point of view to include in the responsibility of the neighbors, the population, and their representative of the population.
I really believe that private, public, and the sectors are the three element fundamental to grow together and fundamental what is missing, the trust each other.
We can work together, trust each other.
Thank you, Jonathan.
You've been nodding along through all of the contributions.
I wanted to turn to you now because habitat for humanity works across very different contexts from rapid urbanization to disaster relief areas.
Bleaning in on that experience from those different contexts, what have you learned about the role of community led and locally driven approaches in the ways we can scale inclusive housing solutions sustainably? So thank you and I'll try to build on some of my colleagues comments with that.
I would say first, that it's a fundamental principle, certainly of our work, and I think of our collective work, is that we build with not for communities and that in a way, habitat for humanities role in thousands of communities around the world was to come alongside very much grassroots.
Then the question is, how can we do that at a scale that meets the moment.
I think it really has to start with how do we unlock the assets in the community, empower them, and come alongside them in a way that creates access.
For us, in some ways, that was moving from housing as a product to housing as a process.
In a way, it forced us to change probably 20 years ago, our framing question from how many houses can we build to what would it take to meaningfully address the housing need in all those communities that we serve, which is a much more a challenging question to all the complexity we've been talking about today, but it really forced us into systems and approaches.
I'll just give a very tangible example.
In Nepal, we've been working with marginalized groups that didn't have land tenure.
We had a great new technology through a private partner for a better treatment of bamboo, highly climate resilient renewable.
Um, but that had to start with education in the community.
There wasn't really interest in addressing a new material unless the families had the right to stay, working with local and national government around tenure issues, bringing in a better technology, but then bringing in finance partners who would give incremental loans to those families to be able to start upgrading and a subsidy program for the very, very low income families in those communities.
I think it's also recognizing that there is knowledge in those communities.
When we think about climate risk and climate resilience, a partnership with the Red Cross, we've been doing training we call PASA, the participatory approach to safe shelter awareness, where the community is designing their own solutions because it's not a question of if, it's when they're going to face challenges or disasters.
Then the question is, how does that community become more resilient in that process? And then I think the final piece is, how do we take that to scale? Because community led development is critical and insufficient.
Unfortunately, there's no one answer to any of these processes.
But maybe one of our best examples was how could we extend housing finance to a significant amount of population that was underserved? We started lending money to microfinance banks, training them on how to housing portfolios, and we found that that was a viable market opportunity.
We took concessionary private capital, concessionary loan from government and scaled that where we could suddenly move to millions and millions of families having access to loans, and I think that could scale far further.
If we think about a system that works anchoring on tenure, adding finance, but then thinking about building materials, thinking about the community education and participation.
And then finally, I think advocacy is such a critical piece.
So how do we lift up the voices of those local communities? But we need local advocacy and also national and federal because the practical reality is there's no model that doesn't include some subsidy in either land or financing.
And how do we then get the highest leverage from those subsidies? I think we've been now for several years doing a global campaign called Home equals specifically around informal settlements and the upgrading of informal settlements.
We did a study that was really powerful that showed if federal governments invested in upgrading informal settlements and formalize them, it could increase GDP by over 10%.
Along with extraordinary increases in health and education in those communities.
It is not just thinking of that as a problem, but actually thinking of those communities as the solution as well.
I think as we heard so much, it's messy, it's complicated.
One of my axioms is the only thing worse than partnering is not partnering.
It's slower, it's harder, but it's the only way we get to actually sustainable and scalable solutions.
Thank you.
I'm really going to have to be the bad guy here and say that we have run out of time because I really wanted to continue this conversation, but I'm sure we'll have an opportunity offstage to do so.
Thank you very much for taking the time to join us and please join me in saying thank you to this fantastic panel and do ask them questions offstage so we can continue the conversation.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Now for our closing statements, I would like to invite to the stage, the Boness of Ashdal and the former Secretary-General of the Commonwealth of Nations, Patricia Scotland, and also Umbreta Temp, the Chief of Land Housing and Informal Settlement sections at UN Habitat.
Thank you.
Reflection.
Firstly, can I say that this has been a most extraordinary session because from the very beginning, Anna Claudia set the scene for us in terms of the nature of the crisis that we are facing.
That crisis is complex and housing is absolutely at the core of it.
But I think we had some extraordinary indication as to what the answers are.
Because those answers are complex, but they are dependent on partnership.
It will take all of us.
That's the message we heard today.
It doesn't demand one effort by one entity.
It demands effort by every entity.
That means it is founded on individuals, on communities, on regions, on authorities using all the knowledge.
Basically from the indigenous knowledge of the areas and the knowledge that we have historically obtained, not rejecting it, but absorbing it and using the new data that we have.
It's extraordinary to think how much we know and yet how much we have yet to learn and how little we are willing to listen to each other.
Because as I listened to the speakers, a number of things became clear.
We have a great deal in common, which we share, which is replicable.
I think sometimes it's like thinking about deciding and discovering that in order for human beings to live, we have to have a sustainable diet.
And that diet has the same components, but it will be flavored in different ways, in different places, but we have to work out what the carbohydrate is going to be, what the protein is going to be, what the ingredient is going to be for us to have a balanced diet.
This is what we are trying to do for housing.
We need to give a balanced diet in order for us to thrive.
There's some very interesting developments and Jeffrey Sachs spoke about where growth is going to be.
It's going to be in the global South.
But what we didn't mention is that, for instance, in Africa in particular, the demographic is getting younger.
60% of the population of Africa is under the age of 25, so we have a different future to look for.
The other issue is we have to get smarter If you look at the climate disasters that we are facing, all of us, we have to understand that the geospatial data which is now available from organizations like UNTR, UNIC, the British Space Agency and others tell us what is going to happen in the next 20 years by understanding what happened in the last 50 years.
We have to plan for future climate disasters, not just for today.
But there is some extraordinary opportunities for us.
Whilst I was Secretary-General of the Commonwealth, we were able to do two things.
One, to undertake an analysis of all the SDGs, and the second is to create the generally accepted performance management principles for government.
Now, why do I say those two are important? Because we have to learn together what works and what does not work.
We have to replicate that which works and we have to cease doing that which does not work.
Pooling our knowledge and our expertise is going to be absolutely critical if we are going to be able to house the people of tomorrow.
That data, however, demonstrates to us beyond peradventure, that if we work together, we can actually do this and we can do it well.
But the one thing we cannot do is we cannot do it on our own.
Communities have to be able to participate and we have to listen to what they tell us because in the past, I think we've been rather hard of hearing.
But the models that are coming together are models which actually have worked and worked very well indeed.
And so I hope that in this next session, we will concentrate on replicating the structures that are going to deliver the change.
And I think we have to concentrate on implementation.
We understand, and I won't repeat the analysis of what is wrong, but we also understand the things that we can do together, which will deliver the change that we need.
And so using the technological development we now have, I hope that we will really disintegrate or be able to understand and disaggregate the information in a way that will make it much more applicable.
I have to tell you that I feel confident There's a huge amount of pessimism around which I do not share because there is a level of genius in this room and in this conference, which gives me enormous satisfaction that if we pool together that genius, we will in fact succeed in delivering that which we aspire.
Anna Claudia's analysis, the six elements that she identified, are the things that we will drive through this conference to make sure we come up with the conclusions that are necessary.
I really want to thank all those who have spoken before and to tell you that I have abandoned all my notes and all my speeches because I did something which I think we should all do, and that's I just listened and I hope we'll all do the same.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Thank you so much.
Thank you, Baroness Scotland.
It's such a good last message for this part of the session about keeping that positive energy because you are completely correct that there is a lot to be inspired from and to look positively.
Abreta, please, I want to give the last word of this session to you and your thoughts on what we've heard.
Thank you.
Thank you so much to all of you for still being here and I just want to conclude.
I think the discussion was extremely rich.
I'm not going to add or recap further.
I want to share the fact that in this World Urban forum, there is an incredible richness and new ideas, innovations, some things that we haven't thought of before, and then a huge amount also of convergences and messages that are recurring.
Um, from our side as the inhabitat, we are here really to listen, to broaden our understanding, but at the same time to digest and streamline and simplify this complexity so that, While, of course, addressing the housing crisis holistically with all these aspects is complex, and we need to be able to communicate it simply and that these messages are clear and resonate across the various key actors, the governments, the civil society, the academia, the students.
That's why I want to bring back the scope of this dialogue was really creating the Chapot, the first big dialogue of WUF that looks at all the aspects of the housing crisis, and I think this was achieved Then there will be the specific aspects that will be discussed in the future dialogue.
Please do participate to zoom in on finance, informal settlements, et cetera.
Then also you will find a lot of these recurring high level streamlined messages on some of the key products that we brought as an organization to WUF.
There is the New World Cities Report that is being launched.
It's really rich.
I encourage all of you to have a look and also the housing primer, which is a very short 20 minutes training.
You can find it on the Woof app and it's really good to share with your network so that the key messages and the key things that need to be known can be learned among many, and then we'll keep thinking at more sophisticated nuance level on some of the topics that we really still have a long way to go and crack the Cloud and several speakers spoke about the mismatch between the financing instruments that we have and what actually we need to address the housing crising scale.
There are definitely areas where a lot more needs to be done, but at the same time, there are already some key learnings that we can take forward from this WUF down to our community and our daily jobs to make an impact.
With this, I want to conclude.
I really invite you to engage in the different aspects of the World Arman Forum and the upcoming dialogue.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Thank you, Umbera and thanks as well to all our speakers today for really fascinating start of the day and provocations that will take us to the rest of the week to continue as the name says, it's a dialogue.
We want to engage with one another and to continue beyond this forum.
Thank you very much and thank you for staying until the very end.
Have a great rest of your day.
Thank you.