Roundtables - Academia and Research Roundtable (WUF13)

Good afternoon, everyone.
It's an honor for me to start this session.
Welcome to the panelist from the different countries.
Of course, thank you to an for hosting this conference today.
Thank you to representative of the academia research and universities.
Thank you to panelista from Chile, Nadia, UK, India, USA, Mexico.
We will start for this new initiative.
The World Erma Forum Academia and Research will have to panel, the panel research and after the panel education.
But before I give the floor to the Executive Director of UN Habitat, Anat Claudia Rodb.
Thank you, Carlos.
Good afternoon, everyone.
I'm so glad to see so many familiar faces that I have been meeting in the almost two years already since I took my position and I'm so glad that you accepted the offer, the invitation to be here with us today.
I think it's really a powerful group that we have been able to assemble today.
A couple of thoughts of reflections before you start your conversations.
Um, yeah, we all know that the global housing crisis is not evenly distributed.
So we have a mismatch.
Some communities, some geographies are suffering much more than others, although it's a global crisis.
Of course, the capacities are also uneven.
Um, so that's why it's so important for us, you habitat that we max out the potential that we have of the World Ubon Forum and specifically the Wolf Academy, to make sure that we generate a community that is united towards shared research agenda and a shared capacity development.
Here I'm thinking specifically about our new strategic plan.
A 26 29 that starts today putting housing at the center, land, basic services, informal settlements, but also the means of implementations.
The resources, the financial means that we need the aspects related to urban planning to multi level governance, the local action, participation, data, access to data, access to knowledge, all the means of implementation that we put on our strategic plan.
I hope that this roundtable will be able to help us in getting the pieces together, on how we can use applied research to really close the gaps that we need to achieve adequate housing for all.
But also, how can education, how can training work in a way that support the capacities globally that are needed at the local level, at the national level, community, private sector, public servants, et cetera I think we have to recognize a couple of gaps that we have.
I We talked a lot about evidence, we talk a lot about data and research, but it's clear that we still have critical data and research gaps.
In the global North, there is much more capacity to generate data and information.
Let's talk about housing and housing markets, for example, to start with.
Well this information is just not available in the global South and or if it's available, it's locked.
So, and then research is designed and oriented towards data.
So there's a gap here and sometimes the evidence that we get is from the data that is available.
So it doesn't respond to the needs that we have globally.
I think this is one critical critical component of these discussions.
At the same time, we do have a lot of innovation happening on a daily basis.
If we look at the issues faced by the global South, communities, NGOs, universities, researchers, local governments, they are innovating because they need they are on the front line, they need to address.
There is a lot of innovation on practice that probably eventually we haven't been able to capture because of this mismatch of capacities.
Of course, we do have universities, research institutions in the global South, but the question is, have these organizations been able to really capture the comprehensive asset of experiences, innovations that are happening what practitioners are doing everywhere.
I think the answer is no.
I have no evidence for that and no data for that, but I would say no because when I travel through my missions, I see so many things ongoing, and then I cannot read about those because they are not there.
So how can we combine also these capabilities? The strong capabilities, resources that are available for research in certain geographies to the presence of research institutions, universities, and so on, in others that are willing to research that are closer to practitioners, but eventually don't have the resources and the capacity to do? So this is a fundamental structural issue that I would like to put as context so that we don't forget that because this mismatch is there.
So what we expect actually from this community and really hoping that this community doesn't end here, I'm glad we had an initial conversation two years ago in Cairo and we're advancing on this conversation now after our strategic plan being endorsed.
I hope we keep this agenda moving in terms of thinking about it, but also acting through our joint collaborations, but also using the umbrella of the Wolf Academy.
Let's use the Wan forum as pillars, spaces where we meet to take stock.
So how can we advance on a joint research agenda? What is this joint research agenda? How can you habitat strategic plan, how can the next ten years of the new urban agenda benefit from the research that you are already generating and might contribute as a public good? And what is it that UN habitat can do? To leverage what you are already generating and how we can work together in this co production.
At the same time, how can we work with the practitioners that are out there? Evidently, we cannot and you all know that, that's why you are here.
It's nothing new to you, but just for us to keep as reminders, how can we develop research in a different way? You're all doing that.
But how can we promote that and how can we keep doing that? Together with those who are in the practice because nobody working in a city, I mean, less bodies working in a city, working at the community level has time to stop in the national government to stop and write something about what they are doing.
But they have a lot to contribute.
How can we work together on a shared research agenda that can cascade then through your programs, through our programs, a shared capacity development agenda? Because as I mentioned before, capacity development, training, capacity building has been one of the key asks to me to you and Hapt.
Having the content that you shared that applies to the future of the new urban agenda, to the future of cities that cascades into shared and partner training and capacity development.
I know you are doing that already, but how can we potentialize what we are doing and bring that closer to the ground? Collecting evidence from the communities, from the local governments, from the actors, from the politicians, from the people working at national governments, private sector, working on the ground.
How can we enhance these capacities that are on the ground.
Thank you all for being here.
You coming from different places.
Namibia, India, Chile, Azerbijan, South Africa, Mexico.
You're coming from where? France, Colombia.
I'm forgetting Egypt, I'm forgetting countries here, but you're coming from all over the world, Netherlands, Jamaica.
I don't know.
We all have double heads, but you are coming from different places.
How can we move with this agenda? How can we work among the wolfs? I put a challenge for the next wolf host, Mexico.
Here to guide us on that, how we can build this bridge.
I'm very interested in knowing what happened after this round table.
Unfortunately, I cannot stay with you, but those who know me know that I would love to stay at this round table.
Thank you very much.
I Thank you to the Executive Director of UN Habitat A Claudia Rob for these opening remarks.
Thank you for trusting in research in academia.
Thank you for fostering this dialogue between the Global South, Global North education academy.
I'm totally sure that this new powerful initiative will be one of the most important leverages for the World Juran Forum in Strategic Plan and accounts.
Our contribution in my personal investments for continuing in this way.
Thank you so much, Ana Claudia.
We will start our session.
Just for having the same information, on my left, we have the panelista for the research round table, the first one, and on my right, we have the panelist for the education round table.
We will start with the research roundtable.
Thank you for being.
My name is Carlos Moreno.
I'm a professor at Sorbonne University in Paris and it is a great honor for me to start this session.
Thank you habitat, thank you to Rafael Vignol for his amazing job for having today this session.
Thank you for your team, the tireless team for having this session.
So the panel one is dedicated to the question of the role of the research in the development of social housing and the gaps in research that we need to address in order to develop in faced with different difficulties, territorial difficulties on formality, the question of gender equity and in different regions.
For each one of panelists, we have the same question.
What is the most critical research gap? Or missed evidence that we need to address urgently in your different specialties, but focused on social housing and the projections for deriving the quantity important of social housing for closing the gap.
I will start by a Camila Casa from Chile, the International Institute for Environment and Development Housing Justice Hut.
Please.
Thank you very much.
That's a very good question to answer in a very short period, so it's difficult to choose just one thing.
But I will say that more of the evidence is showing more and more that the big gap for addressing the housing crisis has to do with improving existing housing stock and that also means supporting existing efforts that people are doing on the ground to actually house themselves.
And that invites us, I think, from a research side to really try to move away from the questions exclusively in supply, demand and deficit and really try to understand seriously what improving housing means.
That ranges from stma braiding, understanding the dynamics of recovering housing stock in city centers, vacant buildings, and in general maintenance and improving of housing, which also is a very important task for the climate challenges that we are facing.
Now, to get that evidence, to really try to understand what that means, it's not very easy to do it just with big pictures.
We really to get into what is happening in the reality of people that are inhabiting sometimes very inadequate forms of housing and the efforts that need to be done to actually improve it.
The only way to do that is really engaging in process of co production of knowledge that recognize what knowledge exists out there already in the ways in which everyday practices are informing housing, the way in which people are investing in building materials, the way in people are struggling to get tenure security and doing trade offs in terms of investing in long term or short term security.
That needs for researchers to really try to understand our role in enabling and giving visibility to forms of knowledge that already exist.
For me, that's a big gap.
It's not necessarily producing a dataset about something, but about finding ways to really mobilize that knowledge.
That's not only a task for us and given that we are here in a UN space in which member states are basically invited to take commitments and to advance particular agendas, is also an invitation and demand for local and national governments to understand that different forms of knowledge are also valid because often we justify ourselves by saying, but we are talking the language of policymakers and by doing that, we are not looking at what I think are the real important questions.
I think also beyond our roles as researchers in the conversation between civil society, grassroots, state, and local and national and regional level, the questions about how we consider what knowledge is valid and what is not is crucial because that's where the questions for the housing crisis are in what is already happening in our cities and our territories, in our rural areas, and particularly in those neighborhoods that are on the margins of our usual knowledge systems.
Thank you very much.
Thank you so much, Kabila, thank you for respecting this time.
I'm so sorry because we are very, very constrained for the day.
You have just 2.5 minutes for each one of paists.
This is the life of this kind of event.
The second one, Uchendo Chick Bu from Navida Director of the Institute for Land, Living Hoods and Housing, please.
Yeah, thank you.
In terms of the gaps, I think I will speak particularly from the perspective of my region, Africa, especially Sub Saharan Africa.
One of the key areas, as my previous colleague mentioned, is too much focus on demand and supply, but a key gap is the issue of availability.
Um, affordability to there's a lack of reliable evidence on how low income houses can access, especially land in order to adapt to informal settlements.
Most of the research available tend to speak and design the research from the perspective of formal market assumptions.
Still that people have access to titles and that people have access to funding, which is not actually the case.
But the last African Urban forum, the second African Urban forum captured it with regards to lack of data.
And this relies very much around linking and tenure to climate reliance.
The research is not very much forthcoming, especially with regards to informal finance and infrastructure access.
So there's no longitudinal evidence in terms of long time data policymakers can use to make decisions.
But finally, I see that you're looking at me with regards to time Um, there are African houses all over African cities, especially in the highbrow areas, I Abucher Lego S Nairobi, Johannesburg.
This is very common.
You see beautiful houses.
They are unoccupied.
And I was speaking to a colleague from Ethiopia when I met him yesterday and he mentioned that the current Ethiopian government, when they came into power, discovered there were 200 houses unoccupied.
Now, it's difficult to relate how there are unoccupied houses within cities, but at the same time, people do not have access to house.
So this area of research, nothing has been done about it.
But finally, There's also the issue of the fact that there is no specific model for determining and planning for a mobile population.
African population in African cities are highly mobile in places like Legs, if you move from the west to the south, especially for itinerant laborers, they do not normally come back to the same place, and so it is difficult for planners to plan for a population that is not particularly in one place.
And so this is one area, there's a gap and there's a need to devise a model for tracking the population as well as planning for them.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Thank you so much.
Very precise as well for your contribution.
David Dodan from the Institute for Housing Studies in the UK, David, the project for you.
Thank you.
The Institute for Housing Studies is in the Netherlands, although I am indeed British.
When I used to teach research methods, I told students that research was about gathering evidence and generating data and it was about understanding something better.
But the perhaps the highest goal of research was to change minds and change actions.
The question of research gaps to me then comes as being a question about a gap for research that changes minds and changes actions and perspectives on housing policy and practice.
I think a lot of the things we've discussed this week, including the World Cities Report that was launched, really does have some of these messages about the changes of mind.
I think one of the key things coming from there was around the need for plurality and complementarity of approaches to housing and moving towards recognizing that no single approach is going to be sufficient in any city or across cities.
But we need to see how private rental markets, mortgages self build large scale public housing and the transformation of informal settlements are all critical contributions where we can change people's minds and actions.
Then how can we use evidence and analysis to support this? I have a few examples that I think might be useful.
The first is building on past research work that has already been done.
The institute where I work has a library that goes back nearly 60 years.
There is a lot of material that was produced and analyzed that we cannot forget about and that's worth still bearing in mind.
I think related to that is the value of longitudinal research, understanding how cities their housing supplies are settlements have changed and evolved over time.
Here I'm very much in the mind of the work that Caroline Mosa did in Guyer Kel and where she revisited settlements 20 years after first doing anthropological research to understand how and why changes have taken place.
I think we can think about research evidence, and analysis from different sources as well.
I spend a lot of time working on the intergovernmental panel on climate change where we've expanded our understanding of what is legitimate evidence to guide policy and that goes into things which are much more collected from communities and generated by greater or from practitioners and combining the insights and analysis to produce work that's policy relevant, even if it's not directly policy prescriptive.
Thank you.
Thank you for your contribution, David, from India, pushback, the Center for Policy Research, please.
Thank you, Carlos.
I will build on the comments made by my friends on my right side.
My friend from Namibia mentioned mobile population and how it is a challenge to cater to that kind of population.
David also talked about rental housing.
But when we talk about demand and supply of housing, the calculation is always based on owned dwelling units.
So there is very little information on rental housing markets and rental housing demand, particularly in the lower income growth.
Although of late, I have started hearing more about rental housing, even in the World Urban Forum 13, I have heard it more than before.
But still, there is very little known about it, and I think this is a critical research gap.
Let's think of a scenario where people have to decide to move to urban areas.
Availability of rental housing, affordable, good quality rental housing is an important factor in decision making, whether they will move alone or with family.
And this has implications for the pace of urbanization and people's commitment to cities.
Um If migration is not with family, then the accommodation requirement is of hostile type, single rooms, dormitories, bunk beds, bed sharing on 12 hour basis, et cetera.
The focus of research should be on private response to rental housing, particularly in lower income groups.
We know very little about how it is built, who is building, how is it financed, and who is it caring to catering to in many Asian countries.
And are there discriminations in housing markets? What are the identity markers of discrimination? Is it race, religion, religion, caste in India, for example, gender, so on.
All of these questions can be answered with deeper empirical investigation, with household surveys, with community engagement, and much more analytical research that we lack today.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Thank you for your contribution Pushpa.
The floor is Karen from the University of Toronto, Director of the School of Cities.
Please, Karen.
Thank you.
I want to turn the subject to data and one of our specific areas of expertise is residential and commercial displacement.
My specific expertise is what happens when you build a new transit line or you build a new apartment building? Who gets to say and who must leave? We've looked at this around the world at the Urban Displacement project, urban displacement.org.
As others have mentioned, there are challenges in measuring mobility.
Many people are invisible.
We're pioneering the use of administrative data, consumer reference datasets, household mobility level datasets, and cell phone data.
We're tracking temporary moves and we're looking at permanent moves.
In general, we find that people try to stay at home or try to stay close to home as much as possible.
There's a phenomenon of emplacement, not displacement.
We're linking to climate phenomena.
We're tracking displacement from fire, from flood, from sea level rise, et cetera We're linking to political phenomena.
Right now we're using cell phones to track how Canadians are boycotting the United States.
There's a great potential in this data to examine intersectionality, gender, plus household size, whether you rent or own your dwelling, race, and income.
But in those latter two categories, there are terrible missing data problems, terrible missing data for racialized populations and lower income populations.
They are still often invisible in these datasets.
So I'd like to say the gap is if we are using big data, if we are increasingly shifting to a big data world that we're using big data to train our AI models.
We also need to maintain and expand our small data.
In order to understand the population, their motivations, their choices.
But what we're seeing is the opposite.
We're seeing that those censuses are disappearing, they're being taken at more and more irregular intervals, and these are endangered and that's a gap.
Perfect.
Thank you, Karen.
The floor is for Margaret what is Margaret Margaret Green from Chile, Pontificia Cola Chile, isn't it? Thank you very much, C.
Right.
It's difficult to add something, but it's funny how they're all adding to different things which are really important.
I want to go back to housing.
I think that I think many times of housing is in several levels.
I think in the Originally, we already stepped out to the house.
There was a lot of research done on the house itself.
I think at the moment, a relevant gap that we're not treating properly is the next level, which is neighborhood community.
I think there's a big lack there and it is affecting the social cohesion, not only of the neighborhood, but also the whole city and the world, I would say.
I think that that scale, the second scale, I think we did a lot on housing, the next scale should be neighborhood.
I mean, today we have aging households, we have less children in many regions.
I'm talking mostly at this moment of Latin American region.
Of course, we have displaced populations, but we have to have what I would like to call situated research.
Of the problems or the situations go around the world, but they have different answers and different cultures approach it in a different way.
I think that's a research that we have to do to understand because if we want to do proper research and proper solutions, it has to be situated.
And that's at one level.
The second level that I think is also really important is at city level.
I know that at city level, there's been a lot of advance.
We have all the advance, for example, regarding transport in South America.
Things like the Medan was an example in Bogota in its time as well.
But what we haven't managed to do, which also, in other words, we haven't, is have to combine properly different sorts of neighborhoods.
We know we have all sorts of areas in a city, but we need to combine where the poor, with the rich, with the ethnic groups, cultural group So again, we need situated research that understands those locabilities, how they're going to interact, and not to segregate, how each one needs its own space, but how they will enrich if they are located in a certain and proper way.
So my first point was that the house in the last years is overflowing, let's say, the, the household is overflowing the house.
There has to be community spaces.
We have to look for them.
These very small households are not sustainable and we need them to have this collective space, and on the other hand, we need the city to provide all this variety of different neighborhoods together combined.
Thank you.
The time limit is terrible.
Thank you so much.
0000.
I have the timer just in front of me.
Thank you, Margarita, for your insights.
Last but not least, from Azerbaijan, the member of parliament, Vice Director, Faris, Ismail Zada.
No.
Thank you.
Thank you very much and dear guests, welcome to Azerbijan.
Welcome to Baku.
We are very honored to host you all here in our capital city.
Um, Well, some of the panelists have already mentioned the most important word data.
When we do research, when we do studies, our main challenge comes with data.
Here in the case of Azerbijan I would like to take a specific case of our displaced people from Karabakh region, from occupied territories.
Now that we have liberated these occupied territories and there's massive reconstruction going on and there are new cities, new villages being reconstructed, The most important issue for us is how to return these people back to their homes and where to get reliable data regarding their economic activity, regarding their family structure, regarding their skills, professional skills, educational skills.
Now the government of Azerbijan has moved approximately 80,000 formerly displaced people to their native lands and they are living there, they're studying there, they're working there.
There are new communities being created from scratch because previous villages and previous cities have been destroyed.
So when you create these new communities, the main challenge is how to create these settlements, how to make sure that they are right match between the economic skills of these displaced people and the currently available jobs.
What are the opportunities for, let's say, a city planning because some of these people used to live in urban areas, some of them used to live in rural areas.
So for that purpose, government of Azerbijan has commissioned my university where I work, ADA university to do a survey study.
So we have been doing survey study each year among displaced people, trying to understand their needs, trying to understand their preferences, their skills, their economic situation, income, family structure, and most importantly, their desire to return to their lands and to work there and to live there.
This comprehensive research study has been collecting data, much needed data for the purpose of city planning, rural planning, and government reconstruction efforts.
I think this has been quite good experience and I would encourage other countries to utilize this experience working with universities for data collection purposes.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Thank you so much for these inputs.
Thank you for all panelists for your contributions.
I have a few minutes for trying to evoke a resume of your defined contribution, but this is just a point.
We will have the time for brainstorming model, of course.
I want just in this few minutes just underline a few elements in your contribution.
And I will start by this contribution from Margaret Green.
The importance to evoke the question of social housing in the multi sccale in the territorial multiscale.
We have the house, one roof of foot walls, but we need to address more than one roof of foot walls.
We need to address this environment.
We have evoked this level of neighborhoods.
We have evoked this level of the city, the integration of the social space, I will take from my colleague, Erik Kinnberg the concept of the social infrastructure to consider the social housing as a social infrastructure.
Of course, Karen Vg the challenges of the mobile population, what is the situation when we have a new transit line in a city and the question of the invisible population.
I think that this is very frequent, including in the Global South when you have this invisible population and the absence of data.
For identifying this population.
This is a very often situation in Africa as well by the absence of the car identity or the digital points.
The question of the mobile population is related for pushpp attack in India with the more mobile population, the question of what is the good quality in rental housing pushba? This is a real question for our community of refreshers.
What is the link between private housing development for population with the low income, with low revenues, and what is in fact a decent housing not only affordable housing, but decent housing, including services in proximity.
David, with the consideration of the leverage of diversity in researchers for linking the academic research, the educational activities, and they need to study the past research to take the state of art, The question in the media of the housing affordability, I said, the informal structures in particular in the big metropolisies, Lagos.
This is the case in German as well, the difficulty for tracking of populations and for finishing Camilla from Chile, the question of the research in the housing stock.
How could we develop a more qualitative research for understanding the housing stock not only as a number, not only as a figure out, but to identify in the a question of quality in the keyword of clarity to find the leverage the local for improving not only in fact, the number of social housing available, the quality of the social housing, but at the same time with the research to find the new ways for improving the local knowledge.
The local knowledge is necessary in this research community for identifying as well, not only the problem that exists, but the possible solutions.
The solutions needs to align different stakeholders.
These stakeholders are necessary to establish a dialogue for facilitating the convergence.
In this way, the academic research could play a relevant role because our neutrality, I could say that our objectivity, I prefer that neutrality because science is not necessarily neutral.
This is my personal point of view.
Because we are committed for social housing, we are committed for developing more quality of life.
We are committed for having more livable cities.
This is the committee point of view, not necessarily neutral, but we need to contribute with our academic research to develop this diet, zero, zero, this is my resume and we will start the second panel.
This is the educational panel.
Okay.
Yeah.
Thank you.
Sorry.
Sorry.
This is the second part of this same panel.
I have a question for each one of panelist.
Yeah.
Okay.
The question for this second part for the research panel is to have a particular point of view from each of panelists related to your expertise, even your origins, the territory or city or your academic specialty.
I will start by Camilla.
This is the same order previously.
Camilla, you have worked previously, the production of knowledge.
How can co produce knowledge for helping cities to address inequalities in the social housing practice.
Please, you have the floor.
Thank you, Carlos.
Well, from my perspective and I think hopefully that's something that many of us share here, genuine knowledge cannot be co produced.
There is no way we can really understand what is going on and what is needed if it's not in a co produced manner.
We know that homogenized data that has been approached in many countries in the issue of social housing actually has some of the worst kinds of housing responses, that large scale inappropriate housing that in the long term has lost both its use value for those who live there and its exchange value from an economic perspective.
That also has been the product of homogenizing data that basically doesn't understand what is really going on in the territories and in people.
For me, the question is not like if we need co produce knowledge, but actually how to advance a proper co produced knowledge that recognize what David was referring to about this diversity of demands of needs and aspirations in terms of housing and the potential responses that that implies in order to really challenge the discriminations that are embedded in the visibility of those different needs and aspiration.
Let me give you a very concrete example that is tackling from my perspective, one of the largest issues that we face when we think about housing injustices, that is the age of forced evictions.
Forced evictions that are a gross violation of human rights are an area of work that is very difficult to document and very difficult to build data on for many reasons.
We know that there is an emergence of many, many initiatives and observatories and organizations that are documenting what forced evictions mean, the scale in Latin American context.
We have, of course, the guiding experience of Brazil, that started from the World Cup in the last decade, but through the seria evictions campaign after the pandemic, but also emerging smaller initiatives in my own country in Chile, I'm part of a human rights and evictions Network, Arson Argentina and Mexico and basically civil society organizations, intermediary organizations, NGOs, local groups, grassroots groups, and organizing and gathering information that otherwise remain totally invisible for government and decision making.
That invisibility basically opened the possibility of continued injustices.
So I think the research of organization, and this is something that actually I have already said in my first intervention, it has much more to do with supporting and collecting information that is already there.
Of course, there are gaps and identifying those gaps is important, but the way to identify those gaps is first by looking at what is already being generated and what is already out in the city and in different settlements and that can take very different forms.
It's not always a dataset, sometimes are videos, sometimes are stories, sometimes are other forms of knowledge production that are out there and that we need to start looking closely to really challenge what I think what are the most acute injustices that some of our governments are producing in the housing sector.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Perfect.
Thank you, Camilla.
Ocean Do the question is for you, how can research on everyday urban life better informal land tenure and housing policy without intended consequences? Thank you.
I I will start by saying that the researcher needs to watch the mindset.
For instance, looking at it from the perspective of land administration, one could say that it's not really an world.
If 60% of a population in Africa decide to live in few cities.
But the rural land in Africa is 90%, one can argue that it's not an Organ world.
Now, I'm not saying it's not an Organ world.
I'm saying that it's being defined purely from the perspective of population and it's become a culture that even the population analysts and the urban researchers do not give room for any other perspective of seeing things.
So I think there's a need to broaden their mindset.
So to define or design a new research way going forward, that needs to be done, and that is important.
Then another aspect would be to also take a more multifaceted approach to design your research.
Um, yesterday, I was in a session on voices from the cities and I learned something.
Someone said that formidable resilience can only be co created.
So we cannot research to understand people's lived experiences, to understand how to deal with the common impending challenge and the current challenge in housing without necessarily co designing.
So co design is crucial because that's the only way we can capture how people actually live, how they build, how they move, how they survive on rapid growth and land pressure.
So I would also like to say that with that, when we co design and view research, at least housing research or urban research from a more integrated perspective, then one is able to appreciate that We do not necessarily, because the world is living more than half of the world is living in the urban or will live in the urban in 2015, begin to prepare to work on them in the urban.
One could as well, prepare the rural in order to manage that impending movement.
I think this is one area that researchers have not been very proactive and because of that, we deal with situation in an isolated manner.
But this is something that was there before I became a researcher, but surprisingly, it is still there on why we need to, um, research the urban alongside with the rural.
Why we need to in the global and to Network, also in the UN habitat, we have what we call a framework we've developed that for urban rural land linkages, which is understanding and taking a broader territorial perspective and understanding the approach from a broader way without missing out the rural because all the land that is needed to cater for the urban is in the rural and we need to always integrate them in the research.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Thank you so much for your insight.
Margarita, the question is, The research innovation needs models and we wanted to turn this research in institutional urban practices with a different scales.
What is your contribution for that? This research should apply to the institutional practices in the urban life.
Right.
Thank you.
Yes, I was thinking that data has come a lot.
I think there's a word that hasn't come still and it's very important for research and it's observation because data can be also misleading.
What I want to say is that the researcher has to have, first of all, a background of experiences of past experience of theories of frameworks, and then applies observation to the problems.
Then comes a very important part also that hasn't been mentioned, which is thinking out of the box or innovation because we need that.
And then that's a researcher or the research centers, let's say, and there comes a golden triangle, which should be government researcher community with a circle feeding each other.
But the researcher will always be listening to the community, answering the questions of the community, and at the same time of the government officials.
I think this is a circle that can be very well and enriching experience.
In Latin America in the last periods, we have had funnily enough, good experiences in that respect.
Governments tend to fund which is very cool not only one research center, but alliances of research cess saying, we want you to do research, but not just any research.
We want you to do research that gives answers to policy and asked for that, not only they want answers that can be applied to public policy.
I think that is a very successful model because there's another thing that I that I haven't mentioned to the moment.
At the moment, we all know that the world, let's say, has all sorts of crisis, climate change, social, political et cet and the academic and era has been in at least in our region, safety is one of the last institutions that still has a certain trust.
They believe in them.
We have had also a very good tradition that our academics form part of governments and then go back to academy.
There's a feeling and the community tends to believe in this tends to believe that these academics that are doing research that are trying to find answers are not biased necessarily, but are really thinking in the best of all the people.
I think that's also a very important virtuous circle that we should incentivize.
Public service and academic research.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Thank you so much.
David.
How can Haugen resources remain actionable, given that they different territorial and Grban context without the negative consequences.
When academics meet with city staff or city leaders or mayors, we get asked questions and just tell us what to plan for or just tell us where to permit billing.
This is very flattering and very risky because it's nice to be asked for an opinion and we are people we want to please and give an answer.
But I'm very much reminded of the famous quote that for every complex problem, there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong.
Um, it's when we do this and we succumb to this temptation that there really is a risk of unintended consequences from research findings and research answers.
Camilla talked about how research can and has been used to justify evictions in the work I do on climate change risk and response, the risks of heat gentrification, where low income groups are driven away because of well intentioned action on addressing heat, where there are evictions or displacement because of the way in which research findings around hazardous zones have been communicated.
So how do we then try and avoid these unintended consequences? How do we communicate with nuance and complexity without simply stifling action? Because that's another risk of research that our answer is always well, we need some more research before we can give a definitive answer.
Of course, we can't afford just to delay and stifle action.
How can we do that? Well, I think the first thing to do, and again, Eugene commented on this mindset issue, avoid dogma.
I think if we see how some of the really significantly influential research on housing, for example, the Soto on tenure, has had too much of a dogmatic leaning and has had decades of unintended and negative consequences.
We need to include diverse voices and perspectives in the research that we do, including the voices and perspectives of affected groups.
We need to build long term relationships between policymakers, practitioners and researchers.
This can be done within research programs.
It can be done in more systematic ways with universities and it can be done through things like mid career training, embedding of researchers in municipal governments, embedding of municipal officials in universities.
All of this is underspinned by really building the trust, building trust between researchers and affected groups and building trust between researchers and practitioners and policymakers.
Thank you, David.
For pushba, K, David has evoked the question of knowledge, the question of the data.
How could we insist to prioritize in India, for example, the case of more reliable data? How knowledge and data could contribute to have trust in academic research.
Yes.
Let me start first with data gaps and continuing my emphasis on rental housing.
I will share with you first where the data gaps are.
Commercial platforms now provide C source of rentals for middle income and you families middle income families and youth, but lower income families are excluded from this digitized dataset that is easily and openly available.
This means the datasets needs to be supplemented with household surveys and engagement with accessible society, local governments, and other partners.
This is where trust building is required because there are multi stakeholders in creating these datasets and not necessarily each one trusts other because they downplay the point of gaps that exist in access and in knowledge of that gap.
This trust building has to be built at what level? I feel this could be done at the local level between universities and city governments and they could come together and co create data and also promote innovations that are taking place at the local level.
Some of these innovations, new ideas, new ways of providing rental housing for young people and migrants are very good and one of these examples that is Republic hostile and Mess from Gujarat is being showcased in Baku.
But how many people know about it in India? There are a few examples, some few more of innovation rental housing innovations in big cities.
One is Arusha Homes and Micro Home Solutions.
But these examples are limited and very little known, somehow, we have to find a way to create such innovators first and universities and local governments could set up knowledge labs, incubators, set up fellowship programs for innovations, and taking forward this data and knowledge for scaling of these examples.
Thank you.
Thank you for this insight.
Karen, the question is, in fact, related to this multi level housing labor cities, the academic research could give more accessibility in actionable ways for the local governments and how could we create a link with the long term institutions presence in particular, maybe in the Global South.
Yes.
Thank you.
Thank you.
I'd like to speak on behalf of all the centers that are connecting the university and the city.
These are centers that have the tremendous opportunity to showcase academic work to the world.
That's what we do at the school cities at the University of Toronto, but there's also 50 urban centers like this around the world.
So too often professors are in very insular conversations with their colleagues and their students.
Sometimes they're not even interested in broader conversations and making change on the ground.
Professors tend to start with the research instead of the knowledge mobilization and it takes years to get the work out, maybe five years from writing the grant proposal to conducting the fieldwork, to writing the peer reviewed journal articles.
Then maybe just maybe they write an op ed at the end, and then everyone forgets about the work very quickly.
So we haven't done enough to bridge the gap between university and community.
We haven't taken the opportunity to build our research questions from the communities around us.
We're doing it the opposite way at the school cities.
For instance, in our downtown recovery project, downtown recovery.org, we use cell phone data to track the recovery of downtowns in North America and Europe.
It went viral.
It was in all the media outlets.
From that, we learned what were the research questions that people were interested in.
For instance, what type of economies are most resilient? Or how can transit systems recover? Then we devoted our time to doing the research to write those academic articles afterwards.
We use all kinds of techniques to reach the public.
We specialize in maps and data visualizations.
We have 1 million views of our data viz each year.
How do we do that? Through Reddit, TikTok, LinkedIn, Instagram, other channels.
We put all of our research in multiple forms from maps to videos, to policy briefs, and then we try to understand what's going to work best in India? What's going to work in Brazil and so forth.
But it's really important when you put out a toolkit or you put out a dashboard to help people integrate it into their operations.
We cannot emphasize enough the need for training and ideally, not just university to students, although that's important, but city to city peer learning as well.
We need to create the tools, reach a broad audience, and create the venues for peer to peer institutional learning and university centers around the world can help with that.
Thank you, Dear K.
Last but not least, Mr.
Faris Ismael Saddam.
You are Vice Director of the ADA University.
The question is, in fact, what is your fundamental research agenda in adequate housing in Azerbijan and the Region, please? Thank you very much.
When we speak of our capital city, Baku and generally big cities, I think three factors really determine our growth and our expansion.
One is environmental factors, second, technological factors and innovations, and third demographics.
Here in Baku, for example, one of the main challenges in the coming years will be environmental issues, especially related to the decrease of the Caspian Sea, the difficulties of the ports that are functioning in Baku, as well as the availability of drinking water because Azerbaijan, as you know, is a country which is receiving water sources from neighboring countries.
Therefore, it is very much dependent on water supplies.
These factors, the environmental factors very much determine the housing growth and urban growth as well.
That's why we need to study these issues.
That's why in our university, we are setting up new research programs on water issues, drinking water, as well as the fate of the Caspian Sea.
I think these factors will determine very much the growth of our cities and coupled with that, of course, technological changes in the country in the world.
We are very much now focusing on renewable energy, trying to replace traditional gas and oil sources with renewable sources.
Azerbijan is very much moving on that as well as working on some smart solutions, smart technologies, try to implement them in daily traffic, daily work of the cities.
These three factors, technological and environmental demographics is also at the epicenter of our university research.
We try to focus on these issues.
What we also try to do is we try to bring international collaboration because alone, we cannot solve these problems.
Azerbijan is relatively small country, especially on water issues, especially on the issue of Caspian Sea.
We need to collaborate with neighboring countries, we need to collaborate with littoral states and try to raise awareness in front of international organizations.
When it comes to technological issues, of course, we need to work with advanced economies of the world, try to bring use of AI, use of big data analytics, and smart technologies.
On all of these three issues, technology, environment, demographics, our university works both locally, but also tries to employ international networks, international collaboration, and make sure that we learn from other countries experience.
Thank you.
Thank you so much.
Thank you for your different insight for closing this first session.
I will propose to this assembly a few keywords of the two rounds of exchange.
The first question, the second question, my keywords, co production of knowledge.
Keyword, multidisciplin expertise from scientists.
To avoid dogmatic answers.
The three keyword need trust between stakeholders to leverage data.
Professor are insular conversations to break out these insular conversations.
The question of the process of academic publication, but this is a question in academic field is not only in social housing.
Of course, Azbalan very clear, the technology, demographic issues, and environmental factors are the constraint for evoking the social housing in a more open minded perspective.
You are okay for closing this first session, Rafael.
UN Habitat is okay.
We are closing now the first session of the World Urban Forum Academy Residential.
Thank you so much for your contribution for insight in the first question, the second question, of course, we will have a round at the end of this session and we will start the second panel.
Thank you for being and I will present.
Yeah.
This is a very tricky exercise because it's the first time when we have started this model for academia research, and we will start with the second panel.
The question is the educational issues.
How we could develop a higher professional education for others, the capacity gaps, and foster innovation for designing and delivery and adequate social housing solutions.
We have for this second panel, thank you for coming here and we have online from the US, our colleague Enrique Silva, we have from Azerbijan South Africa, Edgar, Lucy from UK, the Commonwealth, and last but not least, the guest of the next a forum, 14th from Mexico with Carla and Alexa.
We will start directly online with Enrique Silva.
We have the connection with Enrique maybe.
Yeah, perfect.
Enrique, good morning for you.
Good morning.
Good afternoon.
Yeah.
Enrique is the chief Program Officer of the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy at Harvard University.
Very well known.
Enrique, thank you for coming here.
We have a question for all panelists, please, this is for you the first one.
The question is, and we need in particular in the Global South to fill the gap between the professionals knowledge for adequate housing solutions and the communities because we have a lot of self learning communities that have developing different solutions, but so often, these two universes are disconnected, professional and self communities.
For your experience, expertise, knowledge, What is for each one of you, Enrique, first, the most urgent capability missing in this way for having more coherent approach in the actual work, in the education, in the social housing issue, and how could escape this kind of solution.
Enrique, the floor is for you.
Thank you so much, Carlos, and thank you so much for the organizers for allowing me to participate remotely.
I'm very sorry I'm not there in person with friends and colleagues.
I want to make three points, two on knowledge and skills and one on investments.
The first point shouldn't surprise too many people, at least coming from someone that works in the policy institute, is that the main gap that needs to be closed both in research and education and then with professionals is the need to connect housing policy to land policy.
Too often, housing is treated as either a construction or a financial issue when it's fundamentally about land and it's a land problem.
Professionals need to understand how land markets work, how planning regulations shape supply, and how how planning actions and investments trigger land increases and how those land increases then shape the supply and demand for housing.
The second point that I want to make is the need to connect and technical knowledge with practical knowledge.
The technical knowledge is issues around land, the connection between land and supply and demand.
But the other one is in terms of practical knowledge, really negotiation skills.
Housing policy, land policy, they're not for the faint of heart.
Local practitioners and housing advocates and land use managers really, really need to have strong negotiating skills to be able to manage the multiple stakeholders and the multiple interests that are vested in housing supply and demand.
And the last point I want to make is really more about investments.
And I want to kind of it's less about education and training, but really the need to support local governments and encourage local governments to not only invest in projects, but to invest in people.
And if we're going to make a major effort to scale up education around housing delivery and land management, we need to make sure that local governments have the resources and the incentives to hire and staff the departments that manage housing and land use management with capable people and enough of them so that we can deliver on these promises and agenda.
Thanks so much.
Thank you.
Thank you, Enrique, thank you for more than respecting the time.
We have 1/32.
We have on my left Gul Sola Mamedova, the rector of the Azerbijan Asture and Construction University.
Thank you, Madam.
The floor is yours.
Cho Salon.
Thank you very much indeed.
Speaking of the topic about the necessity to develop the capacity adequate to the needs.
Namely, in a vast geography that we call global south.
Probably different countries have different experience giving the diversity of global south.
If we speak of Azerbijan, we are developing capacity.
The process started 106 years ago and we have developed quite a solid and profound capacity in development of architects, designers, and constructors.
Modern requirements definitely change.
It is very critical that contemporary specialists have to have a broader knowledge, not solely limited to one individual field because there are so many issues and challenges that modern cities and modern communities are facing with.
For that to happen as a university rector Um, I want to speak of practical issues.
Having just bachelor degree is not suffe.
The time allocated for bachelor credits is not the fee, so it's important that students develop practical knowledge as well.
Definitely, we offer a master degree program that can fill in some gaps, including some interdisciplinary topics, as well as introducing experts that can develop new skills.
The university has developed experience for the last five, six years, we launched new master degree programs For example, one of them is on development of sustainable cities, then smart concept of new cities, and these are new master programs that we're offering to our students.
At the same time, we have to retrain some of the existing professionals with short term programs.
With long term programs, we can um introduce new ideas or the ideas that are very critical to modern times.
I'm sure that universities can do a lot and we also do have certain experience.
Time is very limited.
I will not dwell into too many details.
But that said, after the panel, it will be my utmost pleasure to chat about these issues with anyone interested.
Thank you very much for raising this issue and bringing this issue up at this very honorable panel.
Thank you so much for your insight.
Very interesting.
I will give the floor to my friend Edgar Edgar Funding director of the African Center for Cities and he came from Cape Town.
The F is yours friend.
Thank you so much, Marina what a pleasure to be part of this incredibly insightful panels.
I want to pick up on the theme that emerged from your summary of the previous panel, this need for holistic thinking, breaking through silos, understanding the multidimensional nature of the kind of sustainable urbanism we're interested in and that the housing and land question has to be embedded in.
Obviously, this means that you've got to adopt a systems perspective that allows you to recognize these complexities and interdependencies.
What we've done is and I'll talk about a case study and experiment.
We designed and we're testing a new professional master's degree where we've invented a persona of someone called a systems integrator.
The idea is that you come from a professional background as an engineer or a transport planner or an architect or whatever the case might be, You've ended up in a managerial role that you've got to hold these interdisciplinary teams together within very complex institutional settings that are under resourced like most municipalities and you've got to navigate these complex partnerships with the private sector with grassroots organizations and so forth.
What are the specific competencies that you need to navigate that process? Our assumption is that most of these questions start off with a complex identification of what the challenges are.
You've got to marshal different datasets as we've heard.
You've got to then figure out how do you build a shared narrative about what the problem is and what the solution might be that you want to co produce together.
Then you've got to curate and I want to underscore that word.
You've got to curate the processes of learning and failing and testing repeatedly within a highly politicized environment.
And so we've broken that down into seven competency areas and we've structured this professional master's degree around these seven competencies.
I won't go into the detail, and again, very happy to share afterwards, but to say that part of that is then to not just do lectures in the classic form.
You've got to embed these students within different institutional settings, municipalities, the private sector grassroots organizations, because the key is for them is to inhabit and embody the different logics of different institutions that function on the basis of different rationalities.
Unless you felt that in your bones and you sit with that deep ethical complexity of how you resolve these trade offs, it is very hard to build and really lead these kinds of interdisciplinary conversations.
The last point I want to make and this is our current journey, We're trying to now figure out what are the ways in which we can equip these students and professionals with a set of competencies to live with and be accompanied by AI, not to replace thinking, not to replace judgment, but to deepen the analytical capacity and to help with the calculus of the ethical judgments that need to be made in these settings.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Thank you for brilliant insights.
It's my pleasure to welcome my dear Lucy Slack.
He's a practitioner because we have the Secretary-General of the Commonwealth local government forum.
Please, Lucy.
Thank you very much and it's a real honor to be here and join this very August panel.
I feel very honored.
I really want to come at this from two perspectives.
I'm part of a coalition of Commonwealth organizations really trying to understand urbanization better in the Commonwealth.
We came at this from the perspective of research that we've undertaken in terms of professional capacity, which as we all know around the table is significantly lacking.
If we look at professional capacity, whether that's architecture, planners, built environment capacity, there are huge gaps.
I'm not under selling or underplaying that.
But I think as we've done more work and we've looked in more detail, I think we've really picked up on a number of the points that you, Edgar, and also the previous speaker mentioned in terms of the complexity of urbanization from a local government and from a city perspective, and thinking about the skills that actually are not currently available under some of the training and some of the um opportunities that are not available to look at some of those kind of cross cutting and difficult issues, particularly around the multidisciplinary nature of managing cities and managing those relationships.
But the one I want to pull out particularly because of course, it's at the heart of the urban challenge is the question of urban finance and that not really being seen as a profession in itself and not being seen as a skill set that we really need to think about separate from the general sense of finance.
I just really wanted to put that on the table from a very, very practical perspective.
Then linked to that, the other point that I just wanted to make if that's okay, is related to actually where these skills sit.
Because these skills often do not sit in municipalities and cities, they sit separately, they sit in the private sector.
I think we really need to think about what we can do to really strengthen and build the professionalization of local governments to be able to deliver effectively in terms of city management and urban development.
I know it's something that you're working on very closely, Edgar.
I'm not saying it's not happening anywhere, but I think this question of making cities a place where people want to work and can work and can use those really high level skills which we know are needed is really essential.
Thank you.
Thank you, Lucy, for your contribution.
For this representative panel, we have the international figures as well and the floor is for the young Alexa Martinez Soto from the Techno de Monterey academic practitioner as well.
You are very proud of Rafael to host a representative of young people in committee for social housing in the world, Alexa.
Hello.
Thank you very much for giving me the opportunity to be here.
It's really a pleasure and an honor to be around all these capable people.
I think we have We are talking about the same thing related with professionals.
It's not that we do not have capable professionals in the South.
It's not that we do not have innovative ideas.
I think what we need is people who can be the bridge between those two.
I think these multidisciplinary new programs in the university, at least in my country are pretty new and pretty necessary because when we think in the past, the careers were pretty hyper specialized.
You're either an economist or you're either a public politician or you're either an architect.
Right now, we need people who can talk with all of them, understand all of those languages in order to create real cooperation and be the bridge that we want to create.
This part, yes, I think housing, I would like to frame it as a socio technical complex system because yes, we have the technical part, we need to look into the finance thing, we need to look into the material design, into the transfer, into the urban planning, yes.
But let's not forget that housing, it's not just a shelter.
It is a space in which people can grow, can develop, in which we are a nurturing our communities or families and in order to create and design these spaces not just for some people to more diverse population.
For example, I had the opportunity to attend a feminist session yesterday.
They were talking about these caring people in our communities, mainly women and we are not usually taking into account their vision and how we are creating caring series.
When we take into account those vision, then we can, have not just technical knowledge, but human knowledge.
I think in the housing topic, that's pretty important.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Thank you, Alexa, for your input.
I will finish this first part of the second panel with the second Rector.
We have the pleasure to host the Rector of the university in Azerbaijan and to have the Rector of the University de Gualajara in Mexico that will host the next W urban forum.
Carla Plater Palau Thank you very much and thank you for the invitation.
So I think that one of the most urgent capacities that we as university need to develop is the ability to have a comprehension of a vision between our interdisciplinary students when we talk about housing, what we usually think of infrastructure, finance, urban planning, But there is a series of questions around the city and housing and what we need to do goes beyond certain ideas, for example, how do we coexist in certain contexts that are increasingly unequal and fragmented and increasingly complex.
Housing cannot be seen from one only sector, but as a knot of infrastructural ideas we need create interdisciplinary conversations on the disciplinary hierarchy.
This also means to reconfigure the relationship between knowledge and institutions and also public action.
We meet universities that are increasingly involved in the territory in the land.
What does it mean? Real problems that we are facing on a local level.
We have a learning model with a laboratory in the cities, just like at the university of Guadalajara.
This is a very important point, which is the ability to have policies that support people more than political cycles.
That is to say, the building an idea of city and an idea of housing.
Needs to involve different disciplines, different actors, and different levels.
This is a series of questions that indicate what are the main challenges.
And I also include the ethical challenge, and I will go back to this theme and also reaching, making sure that everything that researchers are producing is in contact with reality, but more especially including decision makers and starting from specific data, this can be translated into a public policy.
I think this is one of the main challenges that we are facing.
With this, I conclude Carla Plante De Vin, thank you so much and just before to switch to the second part, I will propose a few keywords of the first session.
This is not exercise in real time, but maybe we could evoke this is the common point of view, the multidisciplinary actions.
For closing the gap in education to close the gap between the technical knowledge and the practical knowledge, to develop the negotiation skills as well, to develop the solid capacity in architecture, construction technology, but to evoke as well the new master programs.
Carla Plan and the director ther evoke this city laboratory, this master specifically in cities.
The new professional called system integrators, I think that this is the key word by the systems integrators for breaking out these vertical discipline.
I want to underline the key word complexity.
I think that, in fact, this is the common point in research and educational activities.
To consider that city is a complex system.
And if we agree with this point, complexity is interdisciplinarity, multi connectivity, interdependencies, and the interstructural links for taking this world of the rector of the Guadalajara.
Just for finishing to prepare students in faced with this complexity because this is not only for practitioners, this is not only for innovators.
This is for the whole community, including students.
I will finish by Enrique Silva with the need to support local governments for developing projects and people and to offer and more adequate training to the local governance as well.
I think that this is the point of view of Lucy as representative of the local governments in the Commonwealth.
Sorry for maybe we have the other key present in your intervention, but we need to switch to the second part.
The second part, of course, in the same way, a question for each one of panelists in your specific sector.
The question of course in this dialogue about how could build more capabilities, how could scale the world, how could have more collaboration and to put in permanence people at the center in your case in education, not only students, by the civic organizations and even the local governance.
I will start in the same order of the previously interventions by Enrique Silva online from the Lincoln Institute, Enrique, great.
Enrique, we have evo these different models, micro credentials, certification, long term certification.
Just what is in your point of view, the way for closing these knowledge gaps for local governments on housing and policies? Any particular, how could we scale this way? Please.
Thank you so much, Carlos.
Thank you for that great question.
First, I'm going to avoid actually focusing too much on individual types of courses or modalities and instead make a broader argument about creating a talent pipeline for land, housing, and community development professionals.
First point is that we need a continuum of learning, not isolated training programs.
Microcredentials, professional certificates, executive education and degree programs, a lot of which we offer at the institute all have a role to play, but the most effective models connect them in a lifelong learning pathway.
If we're serious about scaling up, we need to think beyond mid career training and create pathways that introduce people to land, housing, planning, and community development at a much earlier moment in their educational pathways and journeys.
This gets the second related point.
We should start including housing and land policy literacy, finance, as was mentioned earlier, I'm so glad Lucy brought that point up.
We need to include those well before they enter into their professions.
One reason we face a shortage of qualified professionals is that many students never really encounter these fields or ways of thinking until graduate school or after entering the workforce.
Yet the issues are fundamental to how communities function.
Why not introduce concepts such as housing, affordability, land markets, planning, local government finance and community development at the undergraduate level or even at the high school or primary school level.
We routinely expose students to economics, civics, and environmental sciences, understanding how land and housing systems work as equally important.
Early exposure would expand the pipeline of future planners, housing professionals, public servants, and community leaders.
And if we do that, we'll rely less on mid career professionals, although that's a key important thing.
I'm not saying give up on it, but we need to think about the generating more supply and getting to people and getting these ideas to folks much, much earlier in their careers and part of their just general education and training.
And I'll end there with the two points.
I want to be good with my time.
Thank you so much.
Thank you.
Thank you, Enrique, for your contribution.
I switch immediately on my right to Madam Mamadov Rector of the university in Azerbian.
Of course, for a walk in how could we fill the gap in Azerbaijan for academics, educational and practitioners in this topic.
Housing, social housing and urban practices, please, Madam.
Thank you very much indeed.
The previous speaker said that lifelong learning concept is something which is truly essential.
Yes.
Indeed, we have to follow that.
By all means, we have to make sure that We can offer and cater to the needs of professionals while they have a need in certain capacity.
This is absolutely the way we have to pursue.
The societies and cities are growing so fast that in five or ten years, there will be new challenges that are still unknown and we will need professionals to tackle those issues and we probably cannot definitely project what would be those skills in a decade or so.
For that very reason, we need programs which are more agile, which are fitting the need.
Yes, and a fully second, we have to start earlier.
When we train our students, for example, at the undergraduate level, like be urbanists, be it architects, we need to give them those auxiliaries, so to say, knowledge.
What are the challenges for cities, be it climate change.
Climate change is definitely impactful or digitalization is definitely creating absolutely new nexus or establishment of smart cities and so on and so forth.
On the other hand, I strongly believe that these people, I mean, these students should be also aware of social issues around cities.
So they can cater to the needs of societies they are living, they're working with so they can take into account the demands and aspirations of that cohort.
For that very reason, in education, in university education, we have to take these new issues into account and as educators, we need to upgrade our knowledge as well because educators should be also capable enough so they can provide that knowledge.
Speaking of the capacity of the universities, universities have to go beyond their own walls.
They have to be more accessible to the communities.
They have to create some joint management board.
They have to work with the communities more and more so they can better understand, comprehend what type of potential and capacity the society truly needs for an or for management of the cities.
Thank you, Madam.
Thank you for your contribution.
The floor is for in South Africa, Capital in Jenna in Africa.
We have this faster urbanization.
We have advocated the long term, but now in the short term, how could we close the gap in the educational program on urban and social housing? Thanks, Carlos.
I'm going to be a typical academic and refuse to answer your question.
Good point.
Good point.
The reason is fairly simple.
I think the scale of the challenge in the African continent is so enormous, there is no short term solution.
This is the reality and we've got to accept that we need a systemic solution.
I think in a context where most of our governments are experiencing severe fiscal austerity, which impacts on the investment in education, certainly higher education and professional education, we won't in any short term horizon, see any rise in investment.
I think we need a more ambitious vision that can bring together the professional bodies, the UN agencies, governments, the private sector and civil society.
To catalyze that, I think what might move us forward is the idea of a challenge fund where we can really recognize and validate the city level innovations that is happening between universities, municipalities, grassroots organizations and make sure we can optimize those because I think the source of learning and training will be in those contexts, but we need that documentation.
We need to systemize that.
This is a little bit the first panel.
What's the research agenda, and I think it's there.
We can then build into that a framework about the data layering we need because it will respond to direct needs, but it also then allows us to see how the different kinds of datasets can be more interoperable, but also comparable across contexts and across cities and so on.
It is only then that I believe we can build a learning framework and I really like Erik's idea of a pipeline and really thinking through what lifelong learning looks like.
It has to include tertiary education, skilling new programs, retrofitting existing programs.
We need large open source learning platforms, the hundreds of thousands of municipal officials who have no access to any exposure, we need a low cost threshold for them to at least be exposed at a minimum.
We need them to learn with social movement activists, with entrepreneurs, and so on.
And what can hold that together is a set of literacies around budgetary literacy, design literacy, cultural literacy, most importantly, institutional literacy.
How do these different actors hang together and how do you make sense within difficult and tough political economy context? Scarce resources, overwhelming demand, and so on.
Finally, I want to make a case for bespoke leadership development where we can empower these actors around adaptive leadership skills.
I think this is absolutely vital because at the heart of that, it's two values, emotional confidence to navigate these political fights and conflicts, and secondly a spiritual attentiveness to have, if you will, the zen to navigate these complexities.
Thank you.
The meeting.
Thank you, Elgar.
On your left, you have our dear Lucy Slack.
Lucy represents the Commonwealth local governments.
The Commonwealth involves 50 countries.
Today 50.
And the question is, in fact, what are the main capacities for city leaders in equation of the challenge of social housing and the implementation of training approach for practitioners, Lucy.
Thanks.
Sorry.
Thank you for that.
Suddenly heard myself.
Actually, it's perfect that I come immediately after Edgar because actually you set that up brilliantly, Edgar, because what I really wanted to talk about was the fact that we often forget the leadership dimension in our cities and our local governments and we often forget the need to make sure that our leaders have the necessary capacity to be able to do the kind of job that we need them to do and to lead effectively.
I think it is about leadership training.
I think it is about a essential fundamental knowledge about the urbanization process.
But I think it's also a big question for the academic community, for universities, for training institutions to think about how we do it.
Because the fundamental question is, how do we actually access those leaders in an effective way? They're not going to come to a five day course.
They might be able to do some work alongside their job, but it's a pretty busy job.
I think that we really need to put our heads together collectively.
As the education community and the practitioner community to think about the best way to do that.
I think it's great to have the opportunity to put that out to academics here at this roundtable.
Certainly, some of the ideas of city labs, particularly bringing leaders together to talk amongst themselves, thinking about how we might be able to use different mentoring programs, that kind of thing, so that it's not a talk and talk a lecture, it's much more about situations that you might have found yourself in and then obviously being able to go deeper.
In some cases.
I think that is a really critical piece of the jigsaw.
Just to take advantage of the fact that the panel on education comes after the panel on research, I think a portion of this is also thinking about how we turn our research into information that practitioners can use.
I think that's a fundamental thing that we still haven't really quite got to grips with.
How can we package the data? How can we package that information, but also make sure that our leaders know that they need to be looking out for that data and that information.
I think this cross fertilization is really critical.
Thank you.
Thank you so much, Lucy.
I will finish with the two Mexican representatives, Alexa Martinez.
You are a young academic and innovator practitioner as well.
The question is very simple.
The context of the people center decision making, the question of placemakers.
What does it mean to apply innovation in this context of the human centered cities of the people center making.
Yes.
We were talking in the previous table about this, and I think it's very important.
If we want to listen to our communities, in order to make better decisions, I think we need to listen better our citizens.
Need to have more diversity, we need to have more perspectives, and I think that can lead us to more sustainable solutions.
Of course, I'm going to bring the table of technology and AI to the table because I think these new advances can let us address the challenges of including more perspective into the table because yes, it sounds really good to say, we're going to hear more voices.
Let's bring everyone into the table.
How we address that complexity of having multiple perspective.
There is a huge bottleneck in the collection.
And processing the data from different opinions.
I think AI right now has the capacity to help cities, to help politicians to manage those usually text or sometimes even voice notes because it's not having time we can address more people, if we can go to more communities, the way they are going to communicate with us is mainly just by ice and having a technology that can can allow us to process the data.
We need to have more space to technology can hear those voices better.
Yes, I think if we can accelerate the introduction of technology in the governments, we can improve our slow systems and that will be a very nice goal.
Thank you.
Thank you, Alexa, for your input, for closing this session, the director of the University of Gualajara Clan, Carla de Rosa Gualaja is one of the most prestigious and largest Latin America universities.
You are the advocacy for interdisciparity, and to develop the new curricula.
What is in your point of view, the priority, what do you consider the things still missing today for having a more complete curricula on educational issues for social housing and urban of the 21st century.
I think that one of the most important problem is that we still have a professional training for a world that doesn't exist anymore.
So we live in a different world, which is also differently organized, also considering big data, AI, urban problems, and environmental ones.
These are some of the elements that we can use as a reference of the fact that we are living a different area, a different era, sorry.
This leads to the need to recognize the change.
As a constant element and starting from this, from the constant regeneration of new knowledge, what we need as a university is to develop abilities and skills that will last forever, for example, critical thinking.
This also implies make them understand the complexity and talking about housing as a complex problem that needs complex answers.
The complex answers are related to, as we already said, with a much more integral vision, so a much more interdisciplinary answer because the reality is not segmented.
I think that this is one of the most important points that we need to develop We need also to create systemic thinking.
That is to say, professionals who are able to read what does not appear on indicators, for example, social fragility, daily experience of exclusion, for example, that is something that's very important.
The ability to listen to citizens, organizations, social organizations, people who live and experience problems that occur in this context in cities and in housing in general, we need to train them on these skills, and this is crucial to have the ability to listening the others and also putting at the center the people and also curricula.
We were talking about curricula.
We should make them more flexible and more interdisciplinary.
I'm going towards the conclusion with a sentence proposed by the Laboratory of Science and they say, we need to develop a systemic thinking that allow us to recognize that our environments are built for different levels.
The administration, infrastructure, and territory, but also the integrated knowledge and all of these levels have put people at the center.
Thank you.
A for this amazing contribution.
Dear friends, is the end of this session.
I will just pick up some keyword of the educational roundtable to deliver the final round pop.
It is impossible to start without quoting the devotional word of the Carl Planter.
The systematic way, she said, we have educational system that address a world that doesn't exist.
We need to address the educational issues for a new world or the world of the 21st century, and she as well, the new challenges effectively, artificial intelligence, the new algorithms for big data.
I think that this is important conclusion.
The critical thought, the critical way for having not more permanent aesthetic knowledge, but to do the impermanence, critical in faced with the change.
The key words as knowledge of the change.
The short term solution can't work anymore for the housing problems too complex.
Edgar, I agree.
The lifelong learning model, this is a really important relevant point.
The creating a talent pipeline for addressing the housing and urban challenges, and the importance of stakeholders, innovators, practitioners for developing as well this international a way for port closing the gap between the generations between the generation of the 20th century and the generation of the 21st century.
Maybe I will stop talking now.
Thank you for your presence, the researchers and academics contributors for closing this session.
First of all, I want to thanks Rafael Vignola because she is at the core of this session.
Rafael has organized, she has designed out this world that you want to follow not only our session, Academia research, but more than 50, 70 different events in the World War Forum.
He is the head of this amazing team with Beta, and this is crucial for me, of course, to recognize the contribution of each one.
I want to say to Rafael that we are very grateful for investment for this success.
Now I will give the floor Rafael for closing with the Rome pop and the closing this session for my side.
Thank you so much, dear friends, for your contribution and we will have another session for this closing in a blank star.
Thank you.
Yes.
Thank you, Carlos, and thank you to you for your availability.
Thank you to all.
It would be very hard to repeat.
I want to thank you for making very concrete statements and propositions.
Maybe just to share, I think you have responded to the objective.
Thank you for that, which was to help us as you inhabitat to really together with you, maybe more effective and intentional in how we are going to drive this housing research and capacity development agenda in the next three years.
I really thank you for, I see you have kept the time, thought through your contributions.
I've picked a few things.
It doesn't mean I can't repeat everything, of course, but what really captured my attention is, I'll go in order, but the fact that we need research that is designed for change in action, we started with this, but we ended with this as well, research capacity development learning that put change at the center and by putting change at the center, we look at processes that make change happen.
It's a shift in how the professions collaborate together.
The longitudinal research and looking at how settlements have evolved.
This also came out throughout conversation at the Wolf Academy, all the events we've had that there's a gap in really documented over time in the long time how policies, actions, programs in housing, how the city has evolved and really your work in your universities is central to that.
The question of mobile populations came very strongly in panel one.
I think it means this should be a very strong priority.
Of course, very centrally, the question of invisibility.
I think this is also a threat throughout this bourban forum to understand and inform better housing policies.
Yes, we need more data, but which data? And what is the data capturing and how you have mentioned it, Karen, all the innovations that exist now with new innovative data, um, big data, social media.
This is the way forward to put people at the center.
Um, the neighborhood approach.
I found it interesting that it's from the housing to the neighborhood.
I'd love to discuss this a bit more with you to understand exactly what did you mean by that, but I think it sounds natural.
Um, and yes, uh, you Yun Du Jin, thank you for bringing the importance of, why don't we look at the rural, the more at preparing rural populations and what that means to migrate and understand better this relationship when it comes to the production of new urban areas and housing.
The trust, but also we noted the importance of international collaborations, and I think this round table really represents that as well.
The importance of learning from each other, the question of documenting better at the very local level, but also and Edgar, thank you for proposing that we need large scale available knowledge for practitioners and all and how do we do that collectively? There's tons of things that are doable.
Maybe it's about sitting and see how we can put our joint forces.
Of course, I think the leadership, negotiation skills, how navigating complexity and systems comes out very strongly as a a fundamental skills that we all need to have actually, it's inspiring at all levels.
I thank you, Alexa, for your point on.
It's not necessarily about only training the existing professionals, but what about understanding that maybe there's a new profession that needs to be the link, the link maker between the different professions.
I really like that.
Yes, the anchoring the local territorial anchoring of universities.
This is something that we've been discussing for a long time, but it comes out extremely strongly that there's a very big role to play there, including to capture data, including to capture community perspectives in different ways.
I think Carla, your point could have closed this session, having a critical and systemic thinking and the permanent rethinking of the knowledge you generate more knowledge than we do.
And how this is on a continuous basis integrated into educational programs.
So again, on behalf of the team, it's not just me, Carlos, it's the whole team, we thank you so much for your availability.
You've been a fantastic panel, very diligent and ready and available.
So thank you so much and we really hope to continue the conversation and the collaboration because the problems we're tackling, they are not for tomorrow, they're for yesterday, so thank you again.
Dear friend, the session is closed.