ONE UN - From Commitment to Impact - Advancing Quality of Life in Cities as One (WUF13)

Ladies and gentlemen, distinguished colleagues, partners, good afternoon and welcome to this session.
I'm Suki A Nasrawi and I'm the lead of the Sustainable Urban Development Portfolio at the United Nations Economic and Social Commission for Western Asia.
I thank you all for your interest and participation in this session titled from Commitment to Impact Advancing Quality of Life in cities as one.
This event brings together Esqui, UN Habitat, the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia's Quality of Life Program Center, the United Nations Regional Commissions, and Habitat for Humanity International around a shared question.
How can cities better connect urban policy, planning, and investment with people's lived experiences and everyday realities? Today, cities are being asked to grow and transform.
They are being asked to deliver better quality of life, greater inclusion, stronger resilience, and more equitable urban futures.
This matters because quality of life is where urban development becomes tangible in people's daily lives.
Today, As cities increasingly seek to advance quality of life in measurable and meaningful ways, there is a growing recognition that this requires not only vision, but also institutional coordination, long term planning, and performance oriented implementation frameworks.
Today's session is designed as a journey across perspectives and scales, the way I call it.
We will begin with the global and strategic framing of quality of life.
Then we will move into a reflection on lived urban realities and measurement Then we will explore inter regional experiences and shared priorities before concluding with a city level example from the city of Nie in Serbia on translating quality of life approaches into local action.
With that, let us begin the discussion with two perspectives that help quality of life.
I would say that help frame quality of life both as a strategic policy priority and as a practical urban agenda.
I'm pleased to welcome Mr.
Abdullah Habi, Chief International Affairs Officer at the Quality of Life Program Center in Riyadh, Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, where he leads efforts to advance the kingdom's global role in promoting quality of life and to strengthen international collaboration across related initiatives.
He also serves as the General Manager of quality of life performance at the center, overseeing the development and execution of national transformation initiatives and performance management frameworks aligned with Saudi Arabia's Vision 2030 objectives.
Mr.
Abdullah, the floor is yours and you have 7 minutes, please.
Thank you, Kayah and good afternoon everyone.
It's a pleasure to be here.
Again, my name is Abdullah Khabi and I'm here to share a story from Saudi Arabia.
A story that tells how national priority can be illustrated, a story that tells how national world can be illustrated.
Ten years ago, Saudi Arabia launched its vision 2030.
Part of that vision, multiple strategic objectives were set.
These strategic objectives were there to transform the kingdom economically, to transform the kingdom socially.
And in order for us to do so, and in order for us to pave the road for us to realize those objectives, a lot had to take place.
First thing we started with is we have done hundreds and hundreds of social reforms.
We have done hundreds and hundreds of economic reforms.
Afterwards, a set of what we call the generalization programs were launched.
Those programs are the executing vehicles for the kingdom to realize its strategic objectives.
One of those programs is a program that is very close to my heart, a program that I work for every given day, which is the quality of life program in Saudi.
Quality of life is a very wide aspect.
In Saudi, we define it as twofold.
First is how we can enhance the livability of people in the kingdom, meaning how we can have proper infrastructure, how we can have the means for people to have better experience of their lives in the kingdom.
The second main pillar is lifestyle and how we can enhance lifestyle in the kingdom.
The way we execute this program is through executing hundreds of initiatives, each of which consist of multiple projects and part of these initiatives, collaboration comes as a cornerstone.
Collaboration is an important angle of how we do things.
So Part of vision 2030 objectives, we want the private sector to take part of, we want the private sector to invest in the vision.
A target of 65% contribution of private sector by 2030 and the GDP was set.
So far we have achieved 51%, an increase of 44% in less than ten years.
We also want the SMEs to take part of this.
We put a target of 35% contribution of SMEs and the GDP by 2030 and so far we have achieved 23%.
We also wanted the non profit organizations to take part of this.
Again, we put a target of 5% non profit organization contributing to GDP by 2030.
So far we have increased from just 0.2% to more than 1% in less than ten years.
Looking at the sectors that we deal with in the quality of life with with multiple sectors, be it urban development and planning, tourism, entertainment, sports, so on and so forth.
The program was launched in 2018 and since its launch to date, we have achieved many results and I believe the results speak for themselves.
If we take the sports sector as an example, when we started the program, the number of infrastructure, the open places for people to participate in sports activities was around 300.
Today, we have exceeded 3,200 places.
The impact of this is we managed to increase the adult rate participation in physical activities from 13% when the vision started to 59% as we speak.
Another example could come from this culture sector.
When we started the vigin, we wanted to double the number of UNSCO registered sites in the kingdom.
In 2024, we managed to do that.
The number of VNS registered sites in Saudi today is eight.
The result of all of that can be seen in many global indices, one of which is the World Happiness Report, where the kingdom has jumped 15 ranks since the start of the vision.
Today we are ranked at 22nd ahead of US, ahead of UK, ahead of Canada, and we have a 2030 ambition to reach our top five happiest countries in the world.
Part of what we do is we also collaborate with the best out there.
An example of this could be what we have done with the UN habitat when we worked together on the quality of life initiative and my colleague Mariah will come and talk to you about it.
The quality of life initiative, we started from a realization of a gap.
There is a global gap in having data that governments that tell cities of their plans to develop if their plans to enhance quality of life is working and we believe there was no global indicator out there that measures quality of life from all of its different aspects, whether it's the infrastructure things like healthcare, education, housing, and also from the soft side of things, social cohesion, so on and so forth.
We developed this framework that is consistent, that is broad in aspect, and it provides cities and nations with data that can help them plan, data that can help them achieve results, and data that can help enhance the quality of life in those cities and countries.
This is the short story that I wanted to share with you all today about the transformation of Saudi Arabia when it comes to quality of life.
And thank you all for listening.
Thank you.
Thank you so much, Mr.
Abdullah, for sharing the strategic perspective behind the kingdom of Saudi Arabia's quality of life program and how quality of life is being positioned as a central pillar of the national transformation and urban development.
Thank you so much.
So while quality of life is increasingly recognized as a global urban priority, cities continue to face an important question.
How can we move from broad aspirations to operational frameworks that can guide planning, monitoring, and implementation? On this, I would like to invite my colleague, my dear colleague, miss Maria, global coordinator and program management officer of the Quality of Life initiative at UN Habitat, Saudi Arabia Country Program, to kindly present to us the Global Quality of Life Initiative, its framework, methodology, and the lessons emerging from implementation.
Maria, delos I have Scena for all that.
7 minutes.
I'll do my best.
I know it's impossible.
Make it possible, please.
All right.
Yes, thank you for this opportunity to present on a quality of life initiative, which is very close to my heart.
And also thank you, Abdallah for the nice setup because I think we can dive right into the initiative.
The quality of life initiative, um, is implemented by UN Habitat, but funded through the Quality Li Program of Saudi Arabia, with a number of ambitions.
First, to develop an index measuring quality of life, which we did, and then we tested it and rolled it out in cities around the world.
We also engage in global advocacy around the concept of quality of life and how it's important to focus on quality of life and have a human centric approach rather than just thinking about GDP and really going beyond GDP, um, as a measurement that's important.
Overall, our aim is to improve quality of life, um, at the city level around the world.
Of course, we're also connected to the SDGs, our indicator as part of the index, they map against the SDGs.
But not only that, I think quality of life as a concept is really important because it translates how the SDGs actually contribute to improve quality of life at the local level.
It's a very nice connection between global agendas and what is locally important.
Very briefly about the development of the index.
Very complicated process.
Quality of life is an interesting concept because everyone here probably knows what I'm talking about when I say quality of life.
But when you talk about how to measure it, then it becomes quite complicated.
We went through an extensive process here with private sector, with UN agencies, of course, civil society stakeholders.
Um, and we developed the index, we piloted, as I mentioned it.
What I want to mention is that we recently also submitted it to the United Nations Statistical Commission and we got formal recognition just in March of this year.
So that was a very important stepping stone for us.
Now, our value proposition, there are a number of indices around the world that already exist.
Abdullah mentioned the World Happiness Index, for instance.
We really wanted to see how we can contribute to the space.
What is our value added, so to say.
The first is that in addition to reflecting the objective experience, we also want to reflect the subjective experience of people at the city level.
If you think about it, quality of life as a concept Objective indicators are actually the proxy.
What counts is how people feel about their quality of life at the city level.
The second point that we wanted to integrate is not only a global perspective, but also a local perspective.
I think we can all agree that certain indicators matter no matter where you are in the world.
Adequate housing, I think it matters here in Baku, as it does in Southern Africa, as it does in North America.
However, there are also local sources of quality of life.
For instance, if you're in Vancouver, one of our pilot cities, the natural environment is really important to the ocean, the mountains, Um, we also had two cities that recently completed the index, or one longer ago, Medina and Mecca, two cities in Saudi Arabia.
For these cities, spirituality and religion is really important, and it's a very important source of quality of life for people locally.
So that differs, and we want to be able to capture these different local realities in the index.
We do this by not only having a global layer of indicators, but also a local layer of indicators that cities can develop themselves based on their own priorities.
The third aspect is, of course, data aggregation, which is very important.
We very much try to use innovative data, including satellite imagery, mobile phone ping data.
We do a more traditional survey, but then also issue it through social media and try to get people to complete the survey at city level.
The structure of the index, as I mentioned, we have a global layer of indicators, and then that's complemented by a local layer of indicators.
We have nine domains from basic services to environment, to cultural and recreation.
We have also developed quality of life lenses.
These are really important.
These are cross cutting concepts that go across these different domains.
It includes fairness and inclusion, for instance.
Not only is this important when cities develop their local layer of indicators, but also when it comes to the development of their policies and how they should consider different population groups.
For the global layer of indicators, we have 28 indicators.
I won't go through them all right here.
It's too overwhelming.
But what you can see here is that they're mapped against the SDGs, they're mapped against the UMF framework, and here you can also see what kind of data we use.
Sometimes it's innovative data like mobile phone ping, sometimes it's the survey, but we also use administrative data.
We have one benchmark indicator on life satisfaction and we ask people, how do you feel about life at the city level.
That allows us to see how that connects with the different domains.
Now for the local layer of local layer indicators, we have a workshop where cities are asked to, together with civil society and private sector and whoever they think is important within this discussion, develop and identify indicators that are locally relevant.
We piloted in a number of cities around the world, ten cities from Vancouver to Kampala to Buba Neshaa India, and that was important to us because we wanted to see and test whether it applied to different contexts.
And since we have scaled up to over 100 cities around the world, and Of these, about 30, 32 right now have finalized their index.
You can find it on our platform, QOL impact.com.
Here you can not only see the results, but it's also a tool for cities to query their data and to support them into their policymaking.
It's very much the idea that we're not only developing the index for them, but also to support them into integrating that data, of course, into decision making.
That is a core objective.
Now, finally, key insights from our pilot phase.
With these ten cities, we did a review of how that they find the process.
We also extracted some insights from the data.
What we found is that quality of life is indeed highly context specific.
I think we'll explore that a little bit more in the upcoming discussion.
Um, we also found that combining the objective and subjective data provides very important insights.
So I always get the example of housing of our pilot cities.
Objectively, cities scored quite well on housing affordability.
But then when we ask people subjectively, how affordable is housing within your city rated a lot lower.
So that gap between the objective and the subjective actually points towards some room for policymakers to come in.
Another point here, I want to emphasize that GDP per capita is not a reliable indicator for well being and actually that connects very much with our objective to go beyond GDP.
It is possible to be in a lower income setting, but score well on quality of life, for instance.
That is very interesting.
I think that really has to do with how people perceive progress, how they perceive their city.
It also has very much to do with social cohesion, for instance, people with a very connected societies, they score well on quality five.
I think my time is up, so I'll leave it here.
I think I did my best with 8 minutes.
Thank you so much, Tina and I would be happy to answer further questions later.
Absolutely.
Thank you so much, Maria, you did an excellent job in terms of timing.
Thank you so much for this comprehensive overview of the quality of life initiative, which provides basically the foundation needed for our discussion today and for our session today.
What we hear clearly is that improving quality of life in cities really requires more than working on a project or sectorial interventions.
It requires integrated I would say governance, coordination across sectors that maps to the domains of the quality of life, and a strong understanding of how people experience urban living on daily basis.
This also raises the question of, are we truly measuring what matters most to people? As we discuss quality of life in cities, it's equally important to ask whether our current frameworks and indicators truly capture those realities people experience in their everyday life, particularly in relation to housing, affordability, inequality, and urban vulnerability.
On this, I'm pleased to welcome miss Dina Khalib, Senior Manager of Urban Research and advocacy for the Middle East and North Africa at Habitat for Humanity International, where she leads work on urban housing, research, knowledge exchange, and learning across the region.
She also brings more than 15 years of experience in urban development and development planning.
She holds a PhD in development planning.
The University College London, and a master's degree in economics and international development from the American University in Cairo.
Miss Dina, the floor is yours and thank you in advance for your provocative talk linking housing and quality of life.
The floor is yours.
Thank you very much, Dear Saka for this introduction.
No.
Actually, I'm very much looking forward to this discussion.
Is this where you think this.
Today, as my colleague Ska mentioned, I really want to raise the question about what we are measuring when we talk about quality of life.
Of course, when we're talking about the quality of life in cities, oftentimes what people describe as poor quality of life starts very much close to home.
Yes, of course, it is related to the availability of greenery, of public spaces, the reliability of basic services, but it is also about what is happening within their homes, whether they feel that their homes are a safe space, a dignified space, and the space that can give them the social and physical access that they require for a dignified life.
Just to put this all in context, of course, we have all heard the statistics that nearly 3 billion people across the globe lack access to adequate housing.
We've also heard that more than 1.1 billion people live in informal settlements.
This, of course, translates into many different aspects and dimensions of their daily lives.
People are now spending a higher proportion of the household income on housing.
More of their income goes towards covering the cost of rent or covering the cost of installments if they're trying to own a home, which of course leaves less available for other essential needs.
There is an increased sense of insecurity and really of precariousness, the sense of living on the edge of eviction, of potential homelessness, the edge of the poverty line.
This constant feeling of being on the edge creates a very deep sense of insecurity that is intimately tied to the housing situation.
It is experienced also through things like poor electricity and ventilation, which of course has an impact on health, has an impact on education.
With women, it can lead sometimes to reduced privacy in homes that are overcrowded.
It can lead to increased interaction with potential domestic violence, which a lot of us, I think, saw happening in different places during the COVID pandemic.
And ultimately it can lead to poor physical and mental health.
These are things that we have been hearing from the field in qualitative terms.
As habitat for humanity, we try to explore this more in depth to really understand that link between the dimensions of adequate housing and different dimensions of quality of life.
One of the first things that we did was to look at dimensions of the Human Development Index alongside the dimensions of adequate housing.
Of course, for the sake of time, I would have loved to talk about all the dimensions of adequate housing, but I will provide you as an example.
You will see them on the screen.
We looked at security of tenure, and we also looked at the second dimension, which is the availability of services and infrastructure.
We looked at how that can impact things like health outcomes for the household, education outcomes, and outcomes in terms of household income.
Of course, we found almost a direct impact of these dimensions of adequate housing.
Increased security of tenure can lead to an increase in the asset base of the household.
It can lead to a longer and more stable relationship with the school rather than children having to change schools, and it can also lead to improvement in mental health and also in children's nutrition and their physical movement, their physical activity.
Similarly, with availability of services, we also found an increase in disposable income.
We found, of course, numerous health benefits related to the availability of clean water and sanitation, which I think is self explanatory, and of course, links between the reliability of electricity and the learning outcomes for children.
The next thing we did was to try and put this in numerical terms.
We tried to quantify this.
We engaged in a study that we carried out with IIED, the Institute for International Environment and Development, and we tried to pose a question.
If country X, an example country, were to undertake mass upgrading of informal settlements nationwide and or globally, what types of impacts can we expect to see in terms of life expectancy, in terms of the human development index, and in terms of education? So we found through statistical modeling that if one example country were to undertake this mass upgrading of informal settlements, it could lead to up to a 4% increase in global life expectancy, and it could lead to up to 28% increase in years of schooling nationally, simply by focusing on increasing the adequacy of housing among informal settlements.
Now we can only imagine what the impact would be if adequate housing were prioritized citywide.
We also looked at the potential health benefits of upgrading informal settlements, particularly on women.
How am I doing for a time? We found similarly potential very important impacts on health outcomes for women.
We found that by upgrading informal settlement housing, up to 42.9 million incidents of gender based violence could be prevented simply through this upgrading.
We found over 20 million illnesses potentially prevented among women, including respiratory illnesses, heat stress related illnesses.
We really went in depth with the statistical modeling and with workshops that we carried out in over ten countries from different parts of the globe.
Egypt was one of them, talking to women about the types of issues that they deal with that are directly related to the housing unit and the physical structure and adequacy of the housing unit that they inhabit.
Additionally, we found that over 80,000 deaths could be avoided as a result of upgrading housing and informal settlements.
Some were related to maternal deaths, some were related to heat stress related deaths, simply by upgrading informal settlements and focusing on the housing dimension.
So as I wrap up, I really want to raise the question.
When we talk about quality of life in cities, we need to understand how people experience quality of life in their everyday lives, how they experience it through questions that they ask themselves on a daily basis such as will I be able to afford my rent Do I feel secure from eviction? Am I at risk of homelessness? Do I feel safe, healthy, and dignified in my home? If the answer is no to any of these questions, then quality of life remains out of reach.
We need to understand that housing is where quality of life is lived and experienced every day, and if we want to measure what matters, then housing affordability, housing adequacy, and security must move away from the margins of our urban frameworks into the center of our quality of life indices.
Thank you very much.
Thank you so much, Dina, for the rich insights and for grounding our discussion today through a critical reflection on how we define and measure quality of life and whether we're sufficiently centering lived urban realities within our policies and planning approaches.
Thank you for noting to us how basically housing determines quality of life.
Um, thank you so much for this, and I think it's time to turn into the regional exchange and the core of this session, which is the inter regional exchange on the topic of quality of life as one.
I'd like to invite my dear colleagues from across the regions to reflect on how quality of life is being approached within their respective regional context.
Just a second because So basically, how quality of life is being approached within the regional respective context, the specific urban challenges shaping these approaches, and the opportunities, basically that can help cities translate quality of life agendas into tangible impact.
So it's my pleasure.
I changed a little bit the flow because I thought my colleagues need to be onstage altogether with us on this and then I'll flip back.
It's my pleasure basically to welcome Mr.
Curt Kerrigan, Chief Sustainable Urban Development section at United Nations Economic and Social Commission for Asia and the Pacific.
Esca, please join us on the podium, please.
Then let's sit based on the photos appearing on the screen.
I'm also pleased to invite Welcome on board.
I'm also pleased to invite Mr.
Diego Lesia, Chief Human Settlements Unit Sustainable Development and Human Settlements Division at the United Nations Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean.
Welcome, Diego.
And also, let us welcome Mike Calz, Economics Affairs Officer and secretary to the Working Party on Land Administration, Cities Unit, Energy, Housing and Land Management Division at the United Nations Economic Commission for Europe, ECE, thank you for joining us.
It's, of course, an absolute pleasure to welcome Mr.
Giseorire, Economic Affairs Officer at the United Nations Economic Commission for Africa Teco.
Thank you for joining us today and for bringing the perspectives of the Asia Pacific, Latin America and the Caribbean, Europe, and African cities, and I'm from the Arab Region, just as a reminder, perspectives to this important discussion.
I'd like also to welcome my dear colleague Maria, again, the global coordinator in the Program Management Officer Quality of Life Initiative, UN Habitat Saudi Arabia Country Program, joining us during this panel for this segment as a discussant.
I'll take my seat also and sit next to Curt.
Thank you all for joining us and allow me basically to flip back again and this is basically agile planning.
Basically we changed the flow of the session on the go.
Isag before we start the regional exchange and since we're all colleagues representing the different regions of the world, basically to revert to the audience.
You've heard the overview of the program on quality of life.
You've heard the details, the technical details and the pilot cities and the implementation details from our colleague, Maria, and you've heard the provocative link between housing and quality of life with miss Dina Khalil.
Would anyone like to share with us, what is the biggest barrier to improving quality of life in your cities? Whatever comes to your mind before we start sharing our views.
Any volunteers No volunteers.
Just make our job harder and volunteer.
No.
No one? Maybe Zed, would you like to tell us what is for you the biggest barrier to improving quality of life in Syria, for example, and cities in Syria? He's the first victim.
Yeah.
Well, I'll consider he volunteered.
Thank you very much.
Thanks to Kayah for spotting me out.
Yes.
For Syria, it's mainly the conflict currently that have been in the country for the last 14 years and also centralization.
Damascow City is really centralized, even if you have the district, but they don't have the authority nor the budget or the resources to do that.
Centralization is really a key issue regardless of the conflict that's been going for the last 14 years.
Absolutely.
Thank you so much for bringing this issue of the conflict up because unfortunately, as you can see now through the report, it is a common issue across the Arab region and another region also.
Any other volunteer before another one comes a victim? No.
Okay.
Maybe I'll stop having victims then.
Okay.
So, um In this interactive panel, we come basically to an important milestone in today's session, I would call it.
It is the launch of the quality of life in cities paper or study which is basically a study that unifies the perspectives of the different regional commissions on the concept of quality of life.
It is literally a joint effort by the United Nations Regional Commissions, Unhabitat and the Saudi Arabia Quality of Life Program Center.
And building on this report built on a dialogue that we initiated during the 12th session of the World Urban Forum, it reflects a growing global recognition that quality of life is not only a local priority, but a shared urban development agenda that connects policy and planning with people's everyday experiences and aspirations.
If you're interested in the report, this is the report.
We have it printed with us.
Please feel free to pass and take a hard copy, and you can also download scan the QR code and have a copy.
Very quickly before we start the inter regional discussion on the podium, as I said, this report is, this study is the result of more than two years of work.
The validation of this paper happened in the 12th session of the World Urban Forum and we're very proud that we are launching it as one in this 13th session of the forum.
As I said, it's the result of the effort of different partners, and this was also funded by the quality of life program in Saudi Arabia.
Why this study? I mean, you may be sitting and listening to me saying why this study and why now and why into regional perspectives.
Simply because we all know cities are undergoing pressure globally, more than 70% of the world population is going to be in urban areas by 2050, yet urbanization is still intensifying, not only pressure on resources, but it's intensifying inequality.
Adding to the congestion, environmental stress, infrastructure deficit, declining livability, and we're talking about quality of life.
At the same time, we have issues like climate change, the conflict.
Thank you, Zaha for mentioning that conflict and displacement, economic fragility, social exclusion, which are increasingly affecting how quality of life is experienced in cities.
This report in front of you basically studies quality of life along the nine different domains that Maria already mentioned, so I'm not going to go into their details and add to them the technology and innovation aspect, which is cross cutting in April across all domains.
We've added that because across the regional commissions, the domains were regarded as interconnected systems shaping lived experiences.
So they're not isolated domains.
The main outcome of this study is that there are different realities, but there are aligned challenges.
Just in a nutshell, of course, the study goes more into the details, but in Africa, the fastest urbanizing region, we have informant settlements, basic services gap, infrastructure deficits in the Arab region.
In addition to the conflict and displacement, we have water stress, we have highest youth unemployment globally.
In Europe, housing affordability crisis, divides at the level of infrastructure problems in secondary cities and others.
Asia Pacific, you name it, and you have Kurt.
He's going to I'm sure go more into the details of that.
Rural urban, digital divide governance, centralization barriers, and last but not least, the Latin America and the Caribbean, the most urbanized regions, persistent inequality, secondaryity, infrastructure, stagnation, among many others.
But also despite all those differences and realities, we do have shared challenges.
Those shared challenges across the five regions, we can cluster them along housing affordability and informant settlements.
We all suffer from that.
Infrastructure and basic services, inequality and social exclusion, environmental and climate pressures, health, education disparities, digital divides.
So despite the differences in realities, commonalities do exist.
And there are inter regional strategic enablers for enhancing urban quality of life that were apparent through the study as basically common enablers, common strategic enablers.
I'll end on the report with the key messages.
And across the different regions, there were different key messages.
But if we are to highlight some of them, we basically came as one to say that quality of life in cities is a multidimensional outcome.
Rapid urbanization, though it puts stress and it presents risks, but it also, if properly managed, it presents opportunity.
Equity should be as a core principle of urban planning and of course, global progress and well being remains uneven and fragile in the different contexts, but we have to basically approach this.
I'm sharing this slide again, just for those of you who did not scan the QR code to kindly scan it and download the publication.
So I've done lots of talking and now let's turn to my dear colleagues for this panel discussion, and if you allow me, I'll start with Kurt.
As a reminder, Kurt leads urbanization at ASCAP covering the Asia Pacific region.
Kurt, how do the specific challenges within your regional context shape the way cities approach quality of life? What opportunities can be leveraged to address these challenges and how can regional commissions in your point of view, better support cities in enhancing quality of life.
Of course, sharing concrete examples would be great.
Go ahead.
Thanks, Ana and thanks for facilitating this discussion, especially inter regional dialogue because I think as you mentioned, there are some common challenges but very different contexts, and I think that's evidence certainly in the report, especially as you go through and look at some of the graphs and the data.
I would say, For the Asia Pacific region, I think one of the key characteristics, and it was highlighted that there were 1.1 billion people living in informal settlements, 700 million of those are in Asia Pacific and it is really the defined characteristic of our region because inequalities in quality of life are inherent in the gap of formal and informal.
I think that is fundamental to understanding how to address them.
So there are disparities obviously in social protections, but I think some of the the impacts are also need to be taken into account in formal versus informal settlements because the informality will take and has taken decades to address, and it's not still yet adequately addressed.
Key, obviously, and first is adequate housing.
And there are some elements of, you know, what is adequate housing that need to be contextualized.
I think one of the other aspects in our region is the changing demographics and aging populations in Asia Pacific, which is contributing to the emergence of what we call caring communities, health care and elder care.
But I think really the overall approach of care in the context of quality of life can be much broader.
That includes issues of youth and as well as aging populations.
The other area that I would focus on in Asia Pacific is the impact of climate change and there are many.
For the Pacific region, for instance, one of our sub regions, the small island developing states and those in the Pacific, it's hard to consider quality of life issues when you're faced with an existential crisis coming from sea level rise.
Whether or not you will exist in 2050 years really takes precedence.
Great.
Um, the other characteristics of the impacts of climate change are extreme heat, for instance, which is becoming an issue across, I think all regions.
But it is especially acute in South and Southwest Asia and increasingly so in Southeast and East Asia.
I think when we talk about some of these impacts of climate change, we have some traditional approaches to analyzing and studying them and addressing them.
If we look at traditional approaches of, let's look at heat maps and see where the most intense heat is, because obviously that is one of the areas that would affect quality of life is comfort.
But I think what we find is that, that's not an adequate approach because it doesn't take into account who's actually impacting and who are the vulnerable populations beneath that surface.
Again, if you say the hottest part of city A is where it is the deepest red in the heat map, on the street.
That street may be surrounded totally by high rise, well air conditioned, well ventilated residential units.
Absolutely.
It's not insufficient.
It's insufficient to simply look at some of this raw data and illustrations and remote sensing that in theory indicate where these impacts are.
It may be much more acute um, in areas where it's, you know, kind of green but surrounded by informal settlements that only have corrugated roofs and no ventilation.
Okay.
So we must really look at the approaches that we're delivering and that we're promoting to really look at who's actually impacted and what are the different kinds of information that we need to bring into the delivery and addressing some of these issues.
Um The other ones, obviously on climate change related to water resources under stress and things, I think it's already well indicated in the report that our region would be disproportionately impacted by some of those issues as well.
Let me just finish with two things.
I know you're pushing me to finish, but um Our region is also rapidly transforming digitally and access to services, increasingly digital access and opportunities that digitization provide are also not being realized equitably.
Um, especially as it relates to women and girls and opportunities for entrepreneurship and the benefits not just of access to Internet, but all of the ecosystem that digital transformations provide.
I think that goes to quality of life as well.
I'll stop there, but I've got some other things that hopefully will come back in the Q&A.
Thank you so much, Kurt, and basically thank you so much for highlighting this issue of what information to use and how to use it and when to use it and basically focusing on the impact on the vulnerable groups, which in many instances we oversee.
Diego, drawing both on your current role as a chief of the Human Settlements Unit at ALC and on your previous experience as ambassador and permanent representative of Ecuador to the WTO and other economic organizations in Geneva, how do you see the relationship between global economic governance, regional urban priorities, and quality of life outcome in cities? From the perspective of Latin America and the Caribbean, what opportunities do you really see for strengthening the integration of quality of life considerations into urban policy? Thanks, Ka and thanks for the invitation.
I'm very glad to be here.
I think that both of you, Maria, and yourself, did a very good job in terms of framing a discussion in which in the back there is this link between global phenomenon and local situation, local context, as court was mentioning.
I think in the case of Latin America and the Caribbean, I want to mention three main elements.
Rapid urbanization is not the case anymore.
You see that and actually court as well, talk about that and my colleagues, particularly Giusepe will talk about that, but that's not the case in them.
Not anymore.
We are becoming a region, a continent populated by old people.
The population is getting older at the end of the day and that brings a lot of challenges, which is the second one.
There is a in very important demographic shift.
The rate of urban is not growing as fast as it was in the past.
Demography is really an issue.
The third one, and of course, this is the things that is the elephant in the room and we have to mention violence.
You have Figure 12, page 33 of the report, the intentional homicide relative to population in Latin America and the Caribbean is the highest in the world.
If you are all the other regions in the world, they would come to two thirds of this rate of this problem, which is effectively a problem in Latin America and the Caribbean.
That cannot be a separate consideration, cannot be different, cannot be included in urban policy.
Probably it's a little bit of a shortcut, an easy shortcut.
When we are thinking that in terms of designing an implementation of urban and housing policy, bioence is not going to be an issue and of course, it's there and there is a big role for prevention of violence, and in that respect, unfortunately, there is a big link between local context and international situation because this is an international phenomenon and there is the situation of the drug cartels and so on.
It's an international phenomenon.
Finally, I would like to raise as well the importance to take into account these elements and to design a new urban model.
It's like we have been working, we have been researching, we have been developing and creating institutions, national institutions, the institutional architecture of the state in order to address this problem, it belongs to the previous century.
When we have problems that have changed is like the old cliche that once that we have all the answers the questions have changed.
I probably beyond that cliche is becoming a little bit true.
We have an old fashioned architecture, institutional architecture, which is not designed to address these kind of problems.
At the end of the day, and that's one main reflection, is that the public policy problems or the public policy in general, it's a coordination problem.
It's a coordination problem, and also it's a political problem, and we have to say that we don't have to be ashamed or afraid of saying that it's a political problem because we are talking about values, we are talking about judgment, we are talking about equity.
If we want to talk about equity, it's a political statement, clearly.
So governance in terms of the need of integrating several actors in the design of public policy.
But also, many times, we listen to the challenges and the need of increasing public private alliances, partnerships.
But what about the most difficult coordination, which is the interior of the public sector? The whole issue of reaching out to the I to the population, to the most needed population, and of course, designing new policies.
So in terms of coordination of public policy, that's a challenge.
We need to think in a different way and we need to be sure as well that quality of life of a longer life, since we are getting older, particularly in the region, has to be a problem in the public policy cycle.
The first step in the public policy cycle, we need to recognize that something It's an issue and that's the challenge as well.
I will stop there.
Thank you.
Thank you so much, Diego Mike.
I cannot but second you on the importance and the centrality of quality of life in public policy at large.
Thank you so much for mentioning that.
Now we move to Mike, from the perspective of the ECE region, the European region.
How do the specific challenges in your views related to, among many others, land administration, housing, urban governance, really shape the way cities approach quality of life.
Do you see opportunities that can be leveraged to address these challenges? So please share with us your insights on that.
And thank you in advance.
Thank you very much Kayah for the invitation.
And I think just to quickly remind us, the UN ECE region spans across Vancouver to Vladivostok, so we cover what is more or less called the global North.
And it also brings together some of very poor countries, but also some of the most affluent countries and developed cities.
So Within this very heterogeneous region, it's very difficult to say what specifically says is quality of life for a specific city because it really varies from the context and where the cities are located.
But still, I think we have one of the topics as a main challenge that was very prominent here already, which is affordable and sustainable housing and it turned into we now call about it or we call it a housing crisis actually in the UNEC region because we have some people paying up to 40% of their income on housing.
That also means that, they lack funds for the money for other expenses.
So this automatically reduces quality of life.
In a sense, they can spend less money on good quality food, on education, on leisure, or also on savings for the future.
And this is particularly an issue in cities where So the residents can no longer, in some cases, afford to live in the cities where we actually want them to be.
They move further away from work.
They have no longer commuting time.
So this whole package of what does it mean if you cannot afford an apartment in the city where your work is, what does it mean for people is one topic that is quite relevant for a lot of cities in our region.
Um, Then it also means that a lack of affordable housing can delay family planning.
Young people need to live longer in their parents places because there's just no housing available where they could move to.
All these different aspects that impact on the quality of life, I think is quite striking.
Then the other aspect, I think you mentioned aging infrastructure in our region, but also I think aging population is one of the key points that we need to find solutions for.
And basically looking at the overall lifespan of a person, the quality of life also changes.
So what are the needs that you have during different moments in your life? And so this change over to aging populations and how their needs in terms of housing, accessibility, infrastructure in cities is quite important determinant of how well they would assess their quality of life.
And in our region, how I think we've been addressing the quality of life index, and initiative is trying to also link it to the VLR the voluntary local reviews.
I'm very happy that we have a very practical example here from the city of Neice where they explain here on the podium as well on how they've been linking these two processes, and I think that's a good starting point of integrating the different Indexes and review mechanisms that we have to combine them and bring this quality of life aspects into existing tools that we're using.
Yeah, I think I'll stop here.
Thank you very much.
Well, thank you so much, Mike, and actually, I mean, I could hear several statements you said that directly link to what Dina has kindly shared with us, which is housing determining quality of life, and of course, the aging population, and I'm happy also that we have the city of Nj basically to talk about this linkage.
Let's linkage between quality of life and BLRs.
We turn to Africa with Gisepe who has been exerting notable efforts in advancing quality of life within ECA and in the region.
So Gisepe, in many African cities, quality of life is really closely um, linked to rapid urbanization, infrastructure gaps, unequal access to opportunities.
In your views, which approaches have shown the greatest potential for improving outcomes sustainably? Thank you, Kayah, for facilitating this interesting conversation.
Thank you all my colleagues for my great colleagues that are here today to share their thoughts from the regional perspective.
For me, it is a great honor to share my experience and from my direct work in the Africa region.
That as we know, Africa is the most rapidly urbanizing region in the world with an average growth of urban population is above 3.5% every year globally, this number is 1.5, and the driver are primarily the migrations and the fertility rate.
So and connected to this speed of urbanization comes a lot of challenges in terms as my colleagues mentioned in the question, most of the challenges related to are the infrastructure deficit and the lack of basic services.
So these affect everyday, the daily life of people of most of the people living in Africa.
And behind this framework, there is my view, a great potentiality that a lot of positive change are moving also fastly and not in the same speed of urban population growth, but there is for sure, a big change in the context and one of the big change, and then I will give you some example is that we are shifting gradually from a context that is very fragmented, and then I will explain what this means towards a better integration.
Because let's start with the first fragmentation is the governance.
The governance system is one of the key issue in the context of managing urban and face urban challenges and the fragmentation is for sure, one of the key issue.
This means that we have a lot of a lot of a overlapping mandates.
There is not clear mandates between local and national government and most of the mandate for urban issues is still related to national government and we do not a stronger decentralization.
But at the same time, what we are experiencing that there is a shift towards a more cross sectoral approach that this can help to have a better delivering of services.
The second point in terms of fragmentation is the urban data system.
We will know that carbon data system is a key challenges especially in the African context.
We are shifting closely to better integration.
I was part of many discussion and thanks to the quality of life, many discussion with the National Statistical Office.
I can acknowledge that we are shifting towards a better integration of a new data system, IS, mobile surveys that are also a focus of the methodology to build the quality of life index.
Other integration that make me very positive on the changes is the financial limitation.
We know that the financial issues is a big constrain in delivering basic service infrastructure.
But what I can say that is positive things that we are shifting towards a better digitization that make this a cost effective process to, for example, one point is the revenue generation.
So capacity to mobilize more revenue through digital tools.
Um, for sure, something that I need to acknowledge that gradually the municipality are reshaping their capacity to make more fit for purpose.
And this, I think, absolutely makes the trend of changes more rapidly where digitalization, financial constraints, and governance issue can benefit for sure from this change.
Thank you very much.
Thank you.
Thank you, Giuseppe.
I cannot agree more on all of those constraints and the need for the shift towards an urban data system.
Having listened to, and I see Maria smiling, having listened to the different regional experiences and approaches presented today.
Maria, I look at you and I kindly ask you basically from your perspective as the global coordinator for the quality of life initiative, what common threads do you see across regions? And how do you see these experiences can inform a more coherent and let's say, scalable approach to enhancing quality of life? I know it's hard job to be a discussion, but you've got it.
Okay, super interesting discussion.
I'll do my best to summarize it and I made quick notes.
Yeah, Ska and I already discussed yesterday in preparation of this session that really seeing is different realities but with commonalities.
I like that phrase, I'll keep it in.
Some of the interesting things that I've heard is that there are many commonalities, but how it plays out at the local level is different.
For instance, many references were made to climate change, but depending on the context that has different impacts.
We had the example of small island states, that have unique challenges when it comes to climate change, but there's also contexts that are affected by heat, so that's a different dimension.
We really need to take that into account how that plays out at the local level.
Then a frequent mentioned point is a demographic change.
But again, how it changes differs per context.
In some contexts, it's a very young population.
In other contexts, it's an aging population and the different realities that come with that.
Some contexts are urbanizing rapidly, others, actually cities are losing population, so that has unique implications for quality of life.
Then of course, the issue around poverty and inequality was well mentioned, and then the unique situation of informality within quality of life, both in terms of what informality means for people living in informal settlements and how they experience quality of life, but also the unique governance challenges around that and how to solve that also from a data perspective.
There's some violence and safety was also mentioned.
Of course, there's um, a specific context, perhaps in Latin America, but connected to that is also conflict that is experienced in certain regions and particularly in the Middle East and how that connects to quality of life.
Often mentioned was, of course, also affordable housing and access to adequate housing.
Again, maybe in Europe, it's more an affordability issue.
Perhaps in some context, it's even about just having the basic adequate housing.
Now, what that means.
I think what is important is, yes, quality of life is a concept that we all understand, but it means different things in different contexts and to different people.
We have some points that are globally um, the same that are common to us all, and some are locally and regionally specific.
That's one dimension.
I think we should also remember that quality of life is cross sectoral and it cannot just be addressed by focusing on one sector.
I think housing is a very good example of that.
Housing is not only a roof over our head, but also, um, a has implications for our safety, as we heard before.
It has implications to our access to basic services or to education, to health.
If we want to address quality of life, we need to have a cross sectoral approach.
I think quality of life is also cross scalar, so we need to think about how different neighborhoods or how rural and urban contexts connect and how these come together in quality of life and how mobility, for instance, connects to that.
Um, the second point that I want to make is that clearly here the need for better data, so disaggregated data for different age groups across different geographical locations.
How informal settlements have specific data needs perhaps compared to other locations.
Um, we need new data sources.
As colleagues were talking, I thought foresight is also quite important.
How does demographic change influence quality of life in the future? How does climate change will affect our quality of life and new data sources were also mentioned.
Lastly, I heard the point around governance.
I think that's very important.
Points around fragmentation were mentioned.
As I mentioned, quality of life is across sectors.
It's really important that we connect that in our policy making, but we know with fragmentation, both vertically and horizontally how challenging that is.
There was mention of financing, different governance challenges from centralization, among others.
I think if we really want to address quality of life, we need to have governance in the back of our minds.
I also agree with political will, and I think that is a really interesting point because from the cities that we're working with, actually, I think I've seen a lot of political Quality of life is actually a concept that really speaks to city decision makers because it's something that is very salient locally that matter to populations, that matter to people.
I think we need to hook on that and connect it and I think it's a strong opening for us to improve quality of life.
I hope I did this justice.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Thank you so much, Maria.
I mean, what an excellent wrap up for the inter regional discussion.
I personally wouldn't have been able to do it this way.
Thank you so much.
Of course, the centrality of quality of life back to the idea of beat it at the center of public policy and the political will and the political ownership is key to introducing any change.
Yes, I agree with all the points and a you allow me to say one of the strength of the paper we launched today and this inter regional dialogue we just had, is that it connects global and regional thinking with city level implementation.
Ultimately, quality of life becomes meaningful when cities translate those frameworks into planning processes, local monitoring systems, and concrete actions that improve people's daily lives.
That is exactly, I would say, what we see in the experience of the city of Nic.
I'm pleased to invite Mr.
Slavisa Kondik, a representative of the city of Nish in Serbia to share how the city linked the voluntary local review process with a quality of life approach and how this has informed local planning and policy discussion.
Mr.
Slavisa, the floor is yours and thank you so much for your interest and your participation with us today.
The floor is yours.
Okay.
Thank you.
I'm very happy to be here today to share our experience from Nish.
First, I will introduce give a short introduction to the context.
In fact, I'm not really a participant in the whole process.
I'm more like an outside observer.
I think I have objective perspective on the whole process.
Which is excellent.
Yeah.
We in the city of Nish thanks.
This is the picture of our beautiful city.
Nic is a post socialist city that is developing rapidly and as such city, we have many issues and challenges that we needed to address.
We needed some tool to solve these problems that we have, and then the voluntary local review stepped in as a useful tool to do that.
How we have very fragmented the fragmented administration, and we needed some tool to bring more data to the whole decision making process in urban planning.
NS entered this process of VLR in 2023 and here you can see on the map on the right, the map of Serbia.
NS is in the southeast region, and it's the center of the Southeast region.
Start the whole process, initiation of the process was in 2023 in July and the whole process took around the year of developing VLR So you can see the timeline.
First, it started with some data analysis, localization, data collection, and then very importantly, we had some participatory processes to workshops with important stakeholders.
That's where we realized that very important issue about this is that VR it's not some administrative document that we needed to develop, but it's a tool to bring these people together.
You can see the picture from the workshop where we brought all the stakeholders that we thought are important in this process.
And joined there and make some synergy between them.
That was the main issue to improve city development.
In parallel to that, we had another very useful tool.
We started the process of developing quality of life index.
Quality of Life Index was in the city of N, was developed as one of the nine pilot cities.
I think Mariah told earlier said something about that.
We were very happy to be one of the nine pilot cities in the world.
Of course, also Nish was very open to these processes.
We were the first city in Serbia that entered VLR development process.
We were also one of the first city from Serbia to enter this process of quality of life index development.
This quality of life index was very useful to bring some people centered perspective to the whole process.
We link these two processes.
In fact, it was not so difficult not to say that it was easy, but it was not that difficult because it was the same dataset, the very similar indicators, but different perspective.
So we use this to link these two processes, and this is the indicators and the domains that we developed in the quality of life index process and what we did then, what was very important to not only to develop the tool, but very important thing is to implement it and then what will happen in the future, to follow the indicators and to help urban planners and to help decision makers to work on that.
So We founded a monitoring unit in city administration, and this unit's main objective is to follow all the indicators and to give the useful data and input to future urban planning and to decision makers.
Now, we're in the process of developing new general urbanistic plan for the city of Nish and we're trying to implement all that we learned in this process to this process of developing new plan to make it, as I said, more people oriented, not only data oriented.
So that is in short the whole process that we went through.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Thank you so much, Mr.
Eslavisa for this intervention.
It's really interesting to see the linkage between the VLRs and quality of life.
We also from the perspective of ESCO, I would say also from other regional commission, we advocate for basically having quality of life issues at the center of review and voluntary local reviews.
As cities increasingly seek to localize global agenda I would say, experiences such as the city of Nish demonstrate how quality of life can become not only um, a measurement framework, but also a practical tool for guiding local action and strengthening policy coherence.
I guess I'll stop here and we still have around 6 minutes.
It's time for questions and to refer back to the audience if there are any reflections on any of the issues that were discussed, starting from the city of Ns, actually starting from the provocative talk that has Ky provided to us, to the city of Nish, to the summary from the dear discussion, to all the points that were mentioned by our dear colleagues from the different region commissions.
Please pose any question.
If not, I'm going to go back to the victim's approach.
No questions.
Were we that Kyiv speaking about quality of life.
If not, I know that Dina has a question to pose to us and I see Kurt also needing to say an additional point.
If you allow me, Kurt, I'll revert to Dina and then maybe we take final words from the panelist.
Dina? Is there a mic? There is a mic, please.
Well, first, thank you so much to this esteemed panel of experts for all the interesting insights that you shared with us.
I personally learned a lot about quality of life and how it differs from region to region, but also some of the commonalities that we see across different region.
That was the reasoning behind this question that I would like to pose to all of you.
I'm very curious to hear that if you were to think of one specific aspect that you think is under represented in the way we currently measure quality of life, which aspect would that be? I'm really curious to see this is something that will be more or less the same across the different regions or if we will see large variations in each region.
I would really appreciate if each of you would give me your thoughts on that question.
Thank you.
Yeah.
Thank you, Dina, for this and actually you made my job way easier.
I'll revert back to D panelists and basically give the floor to each one of them to respond to this question.
Shall we maybe we start at the local level with the city of Niche if there is any observation related to that, and then we move to the regional commissions.
Sorry, but I didn't really follow up the question.
It was about can you please repeat it? Yes.
I'm not really sure I have to think about that because Indish experience, I didn't participate in the whole process to have the inside view from that, but maybe more participation.
We're having inclusion of citizens, but we don't follow the indicators very well still.
That is the big problem, I think.
As I said in presentation engagement.
Engagement of the people and maybe more education because we need to educate people to involve them in this process to gain the insight of the whole process.
That's a big issue.
Thank you.
Thank you so much for this.
Yes, engagement is key to ensure the needs are captured and we ensure quality of life for all people.
Kurt, let's start with you from the perspective of region commissions.
Okay.
I think the one thing that's underrepresented in the assessment and analysis of quality of life is that the quality of life is not static, that it can vary considerably.
It can vary seasonally.
If you're living in a region where it's typhoon season that's very different than when it's not typhoon season.
Um, it can vary based on public policies and public actions.
And while the initiative is always to increase quality of life, it's not always a single trajectory and it's not always improving.
How do you take into account the possibility of regression and there may be peaks and valleys? Then the other thing that I think is and it comes maybe to foresight and there's no real good way to foresee everything.
That there are always disrupters and the disrupters are often and probably mostly out of the control of cities themselves.
We're seeing disrupters now.
The impacts from conflicts, the economic disrupters of rising prices due to disrupted supply chains, the pandemic was actually a very good example of a disrupter.
The loss of ODA, I think is a significant disrupter.
We don't know the impacts yet of that loss.
There are many others.
How do you take into account disruptors? How do you take into account the variations in quality of life in analysis and in planning.
Thank you, Kurt.
Thank you.
Let's move to Diego in maybe ten, 15 seconds, please.
It never leaves time to others.
I will assist in demography, demographic changes because it impacts everything.
I demography, I will include, particularly immigration due to economic reasons, which, again, depends on relates to global economic shifts.
Of course, I know clearly that there are particularly armed conflicts in the world, but economic immigration is also a strong force and I'm not sure if it's something that we have it in front of us and we are giving it all the attention that is needed.
Thank you, Diego.
Mike, we move to you.
We still have only 40 seconds.
Very quickly, I think what Curry and Diego are saying before, it's a snapshot at a certain moment in time and so it doesn't reflect changes in the quality of life through the course of life of the citizens in the city and disruptive events.
It's one moment and then probably something to be repeated.
Absolutely.
I share that with you, Giuseppe.
Highly context specific is the main point for Africa region when we talk about the difference between urban and rural areas.
The aggregation, the perception of what is quality of life and what matters more for people living there change based on the space, based on the location, where the people live.
Absolutely.
Maria, do you want to add anything? Yeah, social cohesion is reflected in the index, but I think it's often underappreciated and I think it's actually key.
I mean, there are studies that show that if we have strong relationships with other people, our life expectancy is actually longer.
I think that is very critical and it's actually affected by a lot of different aspects such as conflict, migration, urbanization.
I think it's a key component that we need to take into account when it comes to quality of life.
I think so too and basically I agree with all colleagues because whatever was said basically also applies to the Arab region, which is the region that ESCA basically covers.
Just to close, I would say, there are many messages to take away from today's discussion, but I would say improving quality of life in cities would really require scaling collaboration across institutions, regions, and levels of governance in order to translate the shared knowledge into meaningful and measurable urban impact.
This is why we're all here.
United as one to advance quality of life.
Cities.
Thank you to all speakers, partners, colleagues, and participants for this its exchange and have a lovely afternoon.
I invite the speakers for a group photo and thanks for all the participants for their time and interests.
Thank you.
Lo photo.