Roundtables - Professionals Roundtable (WUF13)

Your Excellency distinguished guests and colleagues, welcome.
My name is Lance Brown.
I'm the re elected co chair of the HPF representing the New York based NGO, the Consortium for Sustainable Urbanization that I co founded in 2009.
I'm an architect, urban designer, distinguished professor, author with an abiding love and a profound concern for our urbanizing planet.
It's my pleasure to convene this Wolf 13 habitat Professionals Roundtable, co organized by the Habitat Professional Forum and UN Habitat under the Wolf 13 theme, housing the World safe and resilient cities and communities.
The Habitat Professionals Forum was established in 1999, under the auspices of UN Habitat as an interdisciplinary partnership.
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If whoever is in charge of media could come and help us make sure that we can use our PowerPoints, we'd appreciate it, there should be a slide up now.
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Just give a minute.
Felix is over there right now.
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Thank you.
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Established in 1999, this interdisciplinary partnership of human settlements professionals working with UN Habitat.
It grew out of the initiative of HPF founding members who came together at the Second United Nations Conference on Human Settlements, Habitat two in Istanbul in 1996.
The roundtable meets every two years at the World Urban Forum, supports networking and training and elects the next cohort of officers.
HPF promotes sustainable urbanization and equitable human settlements development and brings together democratic, nonprofit, non political, and non governmental professional associations.
The habitat Professionals forum is now a global platform uniting 27 international professional organizations, architects, landscape architects, engineers, planners, surveyors, health professionals, and lawyers to represent more than 15 million professionals practicing worldwide.
Our shared mission is simple, yet ambitious to support UN habitat in connecting the global professionals, to implement the new an agenda and the sustainable development goals to achieve the policy goals of building human settlements that are sustainable, inclusive, resilient, regenerative, and just.
This roundtable, a now traditional event offered as one of the 12 standing round tables of the wolves, was established to allow a cross disciplinary dialogue among and between the professionals involved in exploring and implementing the UN habitat mission.
The the next strategic plan, the SDGs, and the new urban agenda.
The forum stands ready to support this e, working alongside UN habitat member states, local governments, and partners to translate the new urban agenda and the SDGs into real tangible change in cities and communities.
I have the pleasure of introducing the re elected habitat Chair Eleanor Muhammad, She's an award winning Canadian urban planner and executive leader with over 20 years of impact across public, private, and not for profit sectors.
As a partner at Dialogue, she leads transformative work in urban governance, land use planning, and sustainable city building.
She currently serves as the UN Habitat Professionals Forum chair.
She co chairs the UN Habitat Planners for Climate Action Advisory Board at the Arab Urban Development Institute, and board Director at Canada's National Capital Commission.
Former president of the Commonwealth Association of Planners and the Canadian Institute of Planners, Illinois has led global initiatives in governance, climate resilience, advocacy, and professional capacity.
Over to you, Eleanor.
Many thanks, Lance.
Distinguished guests and colleagues, it is a pleasure to be with you here today.
I want to take a little bit of your time to talk about some of the recent work that we have been undertaking at the Habitat Professionals Forum, starting with the International Participatory Charter.
It was developed and launched at the Habitat Professionals Forum by the Habitat Professionals Forum at the World Urban Forum in Cairo, 2024.
It is a landmark global framework that positions meaningful participation as a fundamental human rights, not simply a planning best practice.
Grounded in principles of human rights, equity, inclusion, ecological responsibility, and access to knowledge, the charter provides practical guidance for designing fair and transparent participatory processes, supported by benchmarking and accountability tools aligned with SDG 11.3 0.2.
It also recognizes the growing role of digital participation, open data, and professional leadership in ensuring participation in measurable, effective, and is embedded throughout urban decision making.
Over the past term, we also established working groups within the HPF.
The HPF is a body full of leaders with great ideas and great ambition, and we figured the best way that we could capture this was to create working groups where we could have a number of initiatives rolling at the same time.
So our first working group, working group one, is the roadmap to Recovery and International Participatory Charter implementation Group, and they lead the implementation of our key strategic frameworks, translating the roadmap to recovery and International Participatory Charter into concrete actions and long term initiatives.
Our second group focuses on communications and membership growth.
This is a standing working group within Habitat Professionals Forum and their role is to strengthen our visibility, strategic communications, and outreach while attracting new member organizations and identifying key events and engagement opportunities.
Our third working group is focused on UN habitat strategic plan alignment.
This group ensures that habitat professional forums priorities and initiatives align with UN habitats and their evolving strategic work, their stakeholder engagement processes, and emerging institutional priorities through ongoing strategic advice.
Our fourth working group focuses on post 2030 and beyond.
We focus in this group on the habitat professional Forum's long term future and looking beyond 2030 and what might happen after that, as well as positioning the forum to proactively contribute to the next generation of urban development priorities with UN habitat.
Finally, our fifth working group advances the habitat Professional Forum's core mandate, which is to strengthen professional capacity globally, developing initiatives that support knowledge exchange, skills development and implementation readiness across the professions, and I should say one of our core mandates.
The next piece of work that I would like to talk about is actually quite exciting.
Just 2 hours ago, the Habitat Professionals Forum launched recovering the Future, a framework for transformative recovery from disasters here at the World of Inform in Baku.
The framework moves beyond the traditional Build Back Better approach, advocating instead for recovery processes that address the root causes of vulnerability and help communities transition towards safer, more equitable, regenerative, and climate adaptive futures.
Aligned with international commitments, including the Sendai Framework for disaster risk reduction, and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the framework promotes rights based and wide landscape scale recovery focused on reducing long term risk, strengthening resilience, and protecting the most vulnerable communities.
The framework outlines practical actions including stronger community participation, landscape led long term spatial planning and regeneration, rapid response professional task forces, and improved accountability in recovery processes.
Through this framework, the Habitat Professionals Forum is calling on governments, professionals, communities, and development partners worldwide to adopt the framework and work collaboratively to deliver transformative recovery from disasters.
Our final initiative that we've been busy on, which is still developing is the International Landscape Convention.
Housing the world cannot be achieved in a vacuum.
Housing relies on landscape for everything, clean air, soil, water, biodiversity, identity, economy, and culture.
The proposal for an international Landscape convention, building on the momentum of the 2011 UNSCO Expert summary, the endorsement at Wolf 11 and the 2024 UN Habitat Urban Thinkers Campus in Birmingham consolidates global support to give voice to everyday landscapes.
It will sit firmly within the broader UN commitment of cross agency collaboration and integrated sustainable development, drawing on complementary mandates of multiple UN bodies, including UNESCO's remit over cultural and natural heritage, UN environment programs focus on improving quality of life while safeguarding the environment for future generations, and the WHO's focus on physical, mental, and social well being and UN habitats own expertise in human settlements and spatial planning.
Rethinking landscape as a radical concept to overcome its virtual invisibility in regional economic, spatial strategies, visions, and ambitions, the proposal extends and builds on conceptual innovation of European landscape convention, recognizing landscape as the relationship communities have with their territory, and that our responses to the materiality of landscape includes our memories, values, hopes and aspirations.
This new view of landscape is holistic, integrating and integrating geographical concept.
It sees landscape as the very infrastructure upon which we depend to create economic, environmental, cultural, and community resilience, identity, and confidence.
The next steps of the International andscape Convention is our launch here as the first consultation phase, and there is a survey that we will make available through our LinkedIn page, and that will be closing at the end of June.
There are also in October 2026 will be an expert workshop hosted by IFla at their Congress in Hong Kong.
Back to you, Lance.
Thank you.
If we could advance the slide to the next speaker, please.
We await Mr.
Manga.
I'd like to introduce Maria Mercedes De Ro, architect and urban planner.
A strategic leader in sustainable urban and regional development with over 20 years of experience across Latin America and Europe, as CEO of Reno, Bogota's Public Land Bank, she oversaw urban renewal and land readjustment in the heart of the Capital.
As Secretary of Planning for Bogota, she directed the Bogota 2022, 2035 and use plan, co designed and institutionalized Bogota's care system and monetary transfer system, serving 3.5 million people and keeping 500,000 people out of poverty during COVID 19.
A Harvard Mason fellow and Lobe fellow, she founded Lock plan to build the governance, planning, and leadership frameworks, Latin America in Latin America and the Caribbean to address their most urgent transnational challenges, climate, migration, peace and security.
Maria, the floor is yours.
Thank you so much.
First of all, thank you, you and Habitat for having me here.
It's been a great forum so far and I'm grateful to be able to share some insights on what the fabric of safe and resilient communities require from us practitioners.
First of all, let's not forget that we urban planners, designers, architects, engineers can barely create any significant change alone.
We're just yet another piece of a gear system, including politics, policies users.
Let's just face it.
We can't always achieve what we want and what we want is not always the right thing to achieve.
But one thing is certain though, there's no way to improve the living conditions of 8 million people in a city such as Bogota without serious comprehensive planning, and that means at least three characteristics.
Planning must be multi sectorial because you cannot resolve for housing without planning for employment or transit or food, energy, and water security.
Planning must be multi scalar because our daily life depends as much on global, regional, and metropolitan conditions as it relies on proximity to other people, services, and places and multi perspective.
Because we're going through a systemic crisis, planetary collapse, deepened inequalities, new imperialism, and no energy transition can compensate for the ongoing wars, carbon emissions that we're seeing.
So let's pause just a second on this World Urban Forums central theme, safe and resilient cities and communities.
Just by pronouncing those words, I picture myself trying to treat a fever by cooling only the forehead.
Cities do not produce the water we drink or the food we eat or the power we rely on.
But urban planning keeps treating the city as a bounded object, a jurisdiction, a market.
Well, after serving as Secretary of planning for Bogota, one of the most complex, unequal, politically charged and climate vulnerable cities in the world, I know it will take more than comprehensive urban planning for cities and communities to be safe and resilient.
The atmosphere does not distinguish between Bogota and the Amazon jungle.
When I say this to my optimistic or cynical friends, they say something like, we'll adapt, just as we've always done.
Besides, who lives in the Amazon? Roughly 2% of Colombian population.
Well, Bogota does not sit in the Amazon, but its rainfall does.
Moisture rises from the Amazon, travels west as flying rivers, hits the Andes and becomes the clouds and drizzle that feed our paaramus.
From that paaramus, 70% of Bogota's drinking water is born.
Our electricity, mostly hydropower, our food dependent on Amazon Andes hydrology.
The equation is very simple.
If the Amazon collapses, Columbia Drive and Bogota starves and we have to shut down it.
Yet we keep making of urban resilience a thing.
That is not just a planning error, it's a civilizational blind spot.
So we have Bota new land use plant, which is as good as possible.
It enables 1 million additional housing units, 1 million additional jobs.
It programs 1,000 additional kilometers of sidewalks and bicycle paths and five metro lines to regional trains, seven cable cars, transit oriented mixed high density development around these mass transit investments, care as a guiding principle for urban planning, 30% more protected land, no new expansion, regreening the city.
We believe truly we were changing the paradigm.
But the Misca indigenous people, the stewards of the Bogota plateau, were not convinced.
You want to grow urban forests, they told us.
But we are the forest you've been destroying for centuries.
Two years of a very hard and transformative conversation and one day they gave us a map.
78 sacred sites, which we committed as a city to protect.
It's more than a map of the land.
It's a map of meaning attaching memories, stories, sounds, voices, values to each of these sites that make Bogota.
Now I know that resilience requires technical capacity, yes.
But first, it requires us to rewave ties with whom we are and where we live.
We are blind because we refuse to see how the Misks ancestors are also our ancestors and how spiritually grounding it is to know ourselves part of this beautiful nature and how morally awakening it is to acknowledge our role in the stewardship of this, our only home for future generations of humans, birds, trees, and forests.
Once you accept that, the conclusion becomes clear.
Resilience will be territorial, or it will not be.
When you go from urban to territorial, everything shifts.
Divisions such as urban, rural, environmental, economic dissolve.
Watersheds and biomes become the real political units.
Time becomes generational and territories as territories thinking centuries.
When you go from cities to safe and resilient territories, you expand your geography, your institutional imagination, your ethics, and it anchors housing In interdependence.
I'd like to invite this roundtable and practitioners to reimagine planning as territorial stewardship, to design at the scale of watersheds, forests, livelihoods, to foster communities as strategic intelligence for a warming planet and build homes as in where your presence matters to other people around you.
What if the political imagination we need is after all, one that replaces extraction with care and considers land as relationship, not as property.
And one that prioritizes community land trust, cooperative housing policies that say, you belong here.
Because when people people thrive when they are able to put down roots, and when they do so, they care.
Housing the world begins by giving people the right and the power to stay.
Thank you.
Thank you, Maria, for your good words, your story of Bogota, and Eleanor for the good words and story of the HPF.
Both stories are fairly dense, and I hope everyone is getting the details as well as the big picture, which seems to be, I like Maria's phrase of strategic intelligence and the right to the city and to care.
I'm going to now give the floor to Elbe excuse me.
Different to do.
Elbe Hasan Mazara, Chairman of the Union of Architects of Azerbijan sitting to my left.
Elbe Anar Azima is the Chairman of the Architects of Azerbijan born in Baku in 1948, graduated from the Azerbijan Polytechnic Institute in 1971.
He worked in landscape architecture, urban planning, and road design.
Later serving as the chief architect of Baku 2089-2001.
He authored over 150 projects, 80 articles, 14 books, including the five volume history of Azerbijan architecture.
He's received major national awards, including honored Architect of Azerbijan and the Order of Glory.
He's a professor at the Azerbijan University of Architecture and Construction, Vice President of the International Academies, and participated in Word architects Congresses in Chicago, Barcelona, Lasan, Beijing Tin, Tokyo Soul, and Copenhagen, and he is one of our hosts.
Thank you.
B Gaspar Persa Thank you very much, Mr.
Chairman.
You have been introducing me in very many details to my colleagues.
I greet you all in the capital of our state in the city of Baku.
I hope that those short time, those short days that you have stayed here have already enabled you to have a certain understanding about how we live, what we're doing, how we are working, and how we are striving.
I assure you that we're doing all that.
We are making all efforts, we are working and trying to resolve all those big problems that are set for the whole mankind.
In my view, Baku possesses certain experience in this area, the issue of distribution of population, of the employment of the population, the issues of creating for the people the normal comfortable living conditions and social services.
However, I think that Yes, I think that specifically this served one of the reasons that the place for holding with 13 was chosen to be Baku.
I think that today we have convened here to discuss the problems that are concerning all of us, even those who are not with us today.
I have a small concern about the fact whether or not too much idealizing our possibilities, our capabilities to impact to influence this process.
Are we not too much trying to counterpose ourselves to those natural processes that are taking place in life? Yes.
To improve the life conditions of the people is perfectly wonderful desire intention and it's good tendency and maybe the architects, the urbanists can do that and know how to do it.
But Knowing and recommending is one thing and I suppose that it is very important for us to understand how exactly and in which ways we can achieve that.
When we talk about having to do that and and that, we have to also understand for whom we're setting these tasks.
If we are setting these tasks for ourselves, This for good sake is good for discussion and for quite a lengthy one which can take months or years.
However, if we are wishing to have the, the practical results from all those activities, so we have to set the starts for those who have the legal rights to resolve to approve this and this is the state, this is the government.
There's rich states and the poor states.
I know that the rich states are Today, by their economic development are taking one of the first places in the world.
I know that in these states they have homeless people, they have poor people, the people who are coming to life on the sidewalks, on the roads and they live there and die there.
Then we have the question, why are those states not paying attention to those categories of their population who are being needy and who need the support.
I don't know the answer to this question.
I don't know.
I always think about it.
I keep thinking about it due to my age, due to my life experience.
I worked in the state structures in the government and I have the private practice, I had the public organization.
I participated in the educational process.
You all heard about this now when I was introduced, but why the state having the highest economic potential is not sufficiently attentive to resolving the problems for their own cities.
I cannot answer this question.
I just know that the urban specialists and architects cannot be successful in the countries without successful and high economic development because all those activities are requiring immense capital investments.
However, having all those opportunities, why this is not done for the own population? I don't know.
That's why I want.
I'd like to appeal to you all to take this problem realistically.
Today, the population of the cities is quite strongly exceeding the population of the provinces of the rural areas and we know the reasons for that.
Firstly, this is the higher income and employment rate in the cities, the opportunities to get the jobs and these are the better social conditions.
This is higher comfort rates and conditions, better rules, communications, et cetera.
That's why the cities are attractive for those people.
We're talking about the fact that the cities are suffering from this.
Yes, the cities are suffering, the environment is suffering the psychic, the psychology of the urban population is suffering because the big concentration of people leads to the condition of nurturing the feeling of hatred to those who are walking on the sidewalk along with you.
This is quite normal with the psychological things and we're forgetting the fact that the diminishing population of the provinces of the rural areas is maybe already a forthcoming danger of food deficit because the rural area is engaging less and less people.
And providing the the entire population is managed due to new technologies.
But what are the new technologies in the production of the foodstuff in the rural area? We all understand perfectly well, this is the chemical and radiation factors as a result of which we are getting the fact that from year to year we have big number of people with oncological diseases with other curable disease and you can say that this is not our issue.
The foodstuff program is different, but I assure that if you are thinking of yourself or the category of persons who are thinking about the future of their states of your population, you have to also remember about this, what is necessary to be done.
By the way, in our country, we are doing that already in the provinces, not only in the territories freed, libération from the aggression.
We are having settlements, cities being built and constructed.
I say with proud that I'm part of this process.
I am participating in the design with my colleagues in those regions, but not only those regions, but in other regions of Azorin we have the living complexes being constructed, the sports center, the medical centers, the educational, we are setting new parks.
Greeneries and we're improving the life conditions in the province we are making the cities less attractive and most of us know probably that the people who grew up in the provinces are quite strongly attached to their land and if they have no human creations for living there, they will not move from that land ever to any peasant will not abandon his land or go to live on the 18th floor of the multi story of most comfortable skyscraper.
This is the path that we have propagate and advertise, promote each in our own country to improve the life conditions in the province and all those good intentions that we're sharing that we'll be discussing that we have discussing already, first of all, have to pay attention there, focus not on the cities where we are living already, but those places where the people are refuging where they are fleeing.
First, for them to stay there and secondly, for those who have fled to come back and stay there.
This is what I appeal you to.
Thank you very much for your attention.
I think I'd like to thank Elbe for the wisdom of his experience.
He's given us a long view, which perhaps in this room only he and I really know.
I'm saying that because I realize we're close in age.
And that means that when we both arrived on the planet, there were only one quarter of the people that there are today.
80% were rural, now 20% rural.
What we've seen is a monumental and dramatic alteration to our environment and the good questions that he raised, how to do what we need to do and who to do it for are very important questions.
Thank you very much.
I'd like next to introduce Shigaa Dasgupta.
Subgata is the Chief of Planning and the Finance section for UN Habitat.
I'm going to give the floor to him and he's going to give us some further marching instructions.
Thank you.
Good afternoon and welcome to the round table.
I hope you're having a good World Urban Forum.
Firstly, I'd like to thank the two speakers for their inspirational but also forward looking ideas that they shared.
I think what I learned from it is that, you know, the professional forum, in spite of being in its 27th year has added meaning and the challenges are many for it, going forward, more intense, more urgent and how we take this to the new set of issues that we face as a community in this world, will require the professionals forum also to work across other stakeholder groups and understanding how we can all collaborate together.
Thank you so much for those inspiring speeches.
The next part of it is essentially as we move down the road today, we will break out into four breakout sessions.
We'll have to do it in this room itself.
Thereafter, we will come back to the plenary and ask ourselves one common question and I'll leave it to Eleanor at this stage to take it forward and to help organize us.
Thank you, Al.
Thank you, Gatt.
We have four different questions for the breakout session and we have members of the habitat Professionals forum who are going to explore very briefly what these questions are.
Our first person to explore the group one question, which will be on the ground implementation.
The question is, how can these frameworks be successfully implemented amongst the professions? And I'll briefly introduce the speaker.
The speaker is Professor Katherine Moore.
She is a distinguished visiting fellow at the University of Birmingham, is a creative and impactful academic whose unique approach to landscape has already shaped thinking in the UK and has huge potential across the globe.
Her highly original work on the West Midlands National Park has stimulated many partners and commenters to think differently about the future and to reframe conventional views about what urbanism means in a climate and nature constrained future and how old and new cities can contribute positively to economic and social well being.
Professor Katherine Moore.
Is that? Yeah.
Okay.
Thank you for the introduction.
Hello everybody.
Before I start talking about landscape, I'd like you all to think about where you grew up and how much that shaped you, your identity, your values, that sense of home and belonging.
This is a very powerful and potent feeling.
This is landscape, the relationship, as we've heard that people have with their territory.
Landscape is not just a backdrop to our lives.
This is to quote Simon Sharma.
This is a living part of who we are.
It holds our memories, shapes our cultures, and whispers to our future.
This is what we need to be thinking about when we're thinking about cities and developing cities.
But we have lost this important connection a way of seeing and understanding its profound significance in life and culture.
It's been systematically stripped away, dismissed by the ingrained habit to quantify, simplify, delineate, reduce everything to its lowest common denominator.
This has created a gap in our knowledge that threatens us in the face of 21st century challenges because landscape, as we've heard the territory has become virtually invisible and the global challenge is immense.
Housing the world cannot be achieved in such a vacuum.
Housing, as Eleanor has said, relies on landscape for everything, clean air, soil, water, biodiversity, identity, economy, and culture.
Whereas we're beginning to realize the significance of in tackling the interrelated and accelerating problems of the climate emergency, pollution, urbanization, health and well being, food and water security, and loss of biodiversity, these things are slowly becoming more apparent and But they're still invisible in most regional economic strategies and this is something that we need to address.
It's a blind spot in regional strategies.
The purpose of the International Landscape Convention is to try and shift this attitude.
It's about changing perceptions and it's never been more important.
We've heard a lot of disquiet about current development practices raised in the 2022 Urban Forum and in the 2024 Urban forum in Cairo at Cop 30 and here in Azerbijan.
It's clear that business as usual is not an option and more radical change is needed.
We need to be braver and more ambitious and more determined to deal with the global challenges we face.
I too have been faced by people saying, we're going to be fine, Catherine, no need to worry about it.
I don't know where they're living.
I don't know what planet they're living on.
How do we change that? We need to have a far greater sense of urgency about what's going on every one of us every day.
So, moving forward.
In terms of the workshop we want to look at, the ILC is, I think, sorry, there is one other thing I want to say, we recognize with humility that humanity cannot do business on a dead planet.
It's of everybody's concern to make sure that that doesn't happen.
The International Landscape Convention is part of emerging cross sectoral and transdisciplinary initiatives from HPF.
Including the participatory charter that Eleanor referred to, recovering the future, a framework for transformative recovery from disasters that we've just had the press release for, and a developing initiative for urban Law.
These are all part of this beginning to develop a new way of working.
Maria mentioned, I mean, I just believe everything that you've said was so profound and this all fits within the broader UN commitment to cross agency collaboration and integrated sustainable development.
So how do we make this work? Those are the questions I want to look at at the workshop.
These events don't fit to, um, political boundaries, not at all, and neither do they fit to professional boundaries.
How do we change the way we work to accommodate those differences? Then how do we consolidate support, gather endorsements from nation states because obviously they make the decisions at this point and international institutions to support what we're trying to do? How do we connect the agendas? How do we explore, for example, how the ELC integrates the mandates of housing and biodiversity and culture and health into a framework that we can all work to? And how do we move from this singular disciplinary focus to respond to the UN Landmark General Assembly resolution adopted yesterday, making it clear in a powerful affirmation of international law, climate justice, and science that it is the member states responsibility to protect their own people from what is an escalating climate crisis.
Thank you.
A couple of other things, but I've been told to be quiet, so I very politely.
Sorry, I know.
Thank you.
We just very time constraining.
I want to make sure that we actually have time to chat about these things in a group.
Our next speaker who is going to talk about the future, what happens next, exploring what happens post 2030 and beyond is Christine Au Clair.
Christine is an architect and urban planner with over 30 years of experience at UN Habitat, where she has worked extensively on housing, urban indicators, and global urban policies.
She has led major initiatives, including contributions to the Global Urban Observatory and the sorry, excuse me.
She has led major initiatives, including contributions to the Global Urban Observatory and the State of the World Cities Report with a strong focus on partnerships, advocacy, and stakeholder engagement through the World Urban Campaign.
She is currently President of ADP Villa Development, a Frank DPhone platform for bringing together urban professionals to promote dialogue, knowledge exchange, and advocacy on key urban challenges.
Through this role, she contributes to shaping debates on housing, sustainable urban development, and the future of cities across the francophone world.
Now, welcome, Christine.
She is joining us online, so I'm hoping that technology is working in our favor today.
Thank you.
Can you hear me? We can.
Thank you.
Please go right ahead.
Perfect.
Thank you, Eleanor.
Congratulations again for your election.
Thank you.
I'm happy to talk from Nairobi as the chair of cities and Development.
Well, as you know, in less than four years, the SDGs are meant to be achieved.
And probably they won't, particularly on essential level like poverty, water housing, health, education, et cetera.
Our contribution at this stage is to take a critical look as professional at the SDGs.
What are the question? What has gone wrong? Where the SDGs inadequate, too ambitious, wrongly framed, and what should we propose next? Which focus to achieve some quick wins for sustainable development? So we did a survey, and this is the purpose of working group four of the HPF and these are the key question today.
But the survey told us five things.
I'm going to be very quick.
I was told to talk 2 minutes and a half.
Number one, we need to keep the principle of the goals.
They are essential.
But we need to fix the way out to operational the goals.
Number two, housing is fundamental.
It must be central and a dedicated SDG or a structural pillar should be there.
Number three, from targets, we need to move from targets to guarantees.
How can those SDG and member state be more accountable on guarantees that are essential water sanitation, housing protection, and reduction of homelessness.
Number four, governance is core.
We need to strengthen local capacity and number five, climate must be embedded into housing, land use, and infrastructure.
So these are the key takeaways of this survey that we did in our community of the HPF.
But we need to go beyond.
My question to the room is what can be the particular focus on the SDGs based on those five takeaways? What are the next steps? How can we broaden this survey, engage with other stakeholders and unite on key demands as stakeholders? I believe in this wolf, there is a strong emphasis on stakeholder engagement, and we need to take this role and the SDGs in less than four years.
We need to be strategic and be ready to push some targets and a clear vision for the SDGs.
Thank you all, and I will continue to listen in the room.
Thank you, Eleanor again.
Many thanks, Christine.
Our third group today is going to discuss today's challenge, and that is what does successful professional capacity building and development look like.
Our speaker is doctor Frank Dn.
He is an internationally recognized urban and territorial planner with more than 30 years of global experience advancing sustainable urban and regional development, participatory planning and territorial governance.
He's widely recognized for his leadership as the immediate past Secretary-General of the International Society of City and Regional Planners, where he served 2019-2025, helping to strengthen the organization's global profile and professional influence.
Welcome, Frank.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Can I ask the next slide, please? Yes, thank you.
Well, good afternoon under the excellent leadership of Eleanor and Lance.
Indeed, a number of working groups were established.
One of them is dedicated on capacity building and development and the output thus far is this briefing note on capacity building that has resulted not only in this breakout group, but also in a training session this morning and hopefully also in something inspiring as we have seen today with the recovering the future.
By the way, recovering the future has a section B titled Capacity Building to deliver regenerative and sustainable recovery.
The call for better capacity building is already built in this very important document.
Although the starting point for this briefing note, if I may, this next slide, I want to go fast.
Is actually first and foremost, what Christine also reminded to us, the SDG, in particular, SDG 11 3132, enhance inclusive and sustainable urbanization and capacity for participatory, integrated and sustainable human settlement planning and management in all countries by 2030.
We're running out of time and we're also running out of people to do it.
Planners, architects, engineers across all the disciplines united under the umbrella of habitat professional forum.
We are simply not enough and we are simply not qualified enough to do it.
Today's challenge for future proof planning is more capacity and better capacity.
Planning skills need to be made more widely available socially and spatially.
And finally, urban professionals, human settlement professionals are the key actors to support both decision makers and civil society to build the essential frameworks and make large cities affordable, inclusive, resilient, sustainable, and safe, and So these are important starting points.
The next slide is a second more recent point of consideration is the new strategic plan of human habitat, 26 29 approved one year ago that has, let's say, housing, land, basic services for all at its core, But you see the arrows around it contains one green arrow saying it cannot be done without the right amount and type of capacity building.
That is the call for the discussion of today with a key proposition that we hope that this meeting will lead to turning a HPF working group on capacity building into a multidisciplinary a committee community of practice and research and thus establishing a body of knowledge and practice on capacity development for well planned resilience and peaceful, sustainable urban development.
I hope that you will be compelled to join that breakout group.
Thank you, Frank.
Then the final question that's going to be explored is building on the value of the habitat professionals forum.
The question that we'd like to engage with is how can the habitat professionals forum better engage with the professions in the global South? I don't have a presentation for you on this.
I think this one is pretty straightforward in terms of what we need to explore.
Okay.
Now, there are a lot of people in this room, and we want to be able to break out in these groups in an organized manner.
So if I can ask if everyone just stay seated for a moment and be very patient with me, okay? So I'm going to ask for the following people to stand up, Natalie Moyson, Demetrios, Avian Tau, and Nadine.
If you can all just come and stand right behind me, please.
Okay.
Then I'm going to ask Katherine Moore to stand up and Wafa Al daily.
And that you are going to be focused on group one on the ground implementation, and you both are going to go into that corner over there.
You're going to go into that corner over there, you and Wafa.
And did Wafa stand up yet? Okay.
Wafa is out of the room, but we'll get her.
Don't worry.
You'll be over there in that corner, please, Katherine.
Can I get Michelle Carroll and Kelly Moore to stand up, please? Now, you two are going to focus on the future, the question there, and you're going to go into that corner over there.
Can I please have Frank Dant and Aon Sab stand up? Thank you.
Ain and Frank, you are going to go into this corner right here and that's going to be group three.
Can I please have Lenore Swison and Alyssa Banskova stand up, please? You both are facilitating question four, group four, and you will be in this corner over here.
Now, before anyone moves, I have extra facilitators behind me and what we're going to do is watch where the crowd goes.
If many people end up in that corner, this group here is going to follow you all into that corner.
Ideally, we want groups of about ten people to be able to have a conversation.
Let's see if we can do this.
Now to remind everyone of what I've just instructed, Group one, in this corner over here, you will be discussing on the ground implementation.
How can these frameworks be successfully implemented amongst the professionals and your facilitators will capture your answers and take notes.
Anybody who is interested in group one, you are going over in that corner.
For group two, the future, what happens next? Exploring what happens post 2030 and beyond.
You're going to head into this corner of the room over here.
For group three, today's challenge, what does successful professional capacity building and development look like? You are heading to this corner over here.
Then finally, for question four, building on the value of the habitat professionals forum, how can we better engage with the professions in the Global South? You are going to head to this corner.
I can ask everyone to choose your corner for your discussion, and then we'll break you up into groups once we get you there.
Thank you.
Yeah.
You'll have to once we get into the corners, we will pull up chairs.
So we need everyone out of the chairs and choose a corner based on the question.
You're going to wait where the crowd I think that.
Just a reminder again for the groups I Question one, Group one is in this corner of the room.
Question two, this corner in the room.
Question three back over here and question four over here.
It looks like we're going to the future.
But they have voted with their feet.
Question.
Group two for that corner over there.
Yeah.
So we'll keep reminding everyone until we see everyone in the corner of the room.
Group one is in the corner over here.
Group two is in the corner towards the front.
Group three is at the back here, and group four is over in this corner.
Do you want to go to the future and go to the future and grab some people and go for it.
Okay.
Just a note to the facilitators, once you have your groups, you have about 10 minutes of discussion, and then we all have to find our way back to this table somehow.
Thank you.
I.
Hi, everyone.
I hope your discussions are going well.
This is your three minute warning to wrap up before we call you back to the table.
Thank you.
We're going to call everyone back to the main table.
If I can ask for at least one facilitator at each group to make sure that they're sitting at the round table near a microphone.
This is the facilitator who's going to summarize what you've spoken about.
If I can invite everyone back to the round table now, I know it took you a while to get where you are, but if we can get you back here at the round table.
It looks like group two will be the first one back to the round table.
Very very efficient.
Can we get another group back to the round table? If you find there are spaces at the round table, please feel welcome to join because we will have a plenary following the report back.
Okay.
Group Group one, we would like you back at the round table, please.
Katherine, that's you.
And who have we got in the back here? Group four, Alyssa and Lenore.
They're so deep in conversation, we can't get you back.
Who did we have in group two as the facilitator? Kelly.
Kelly, if you would join us.
Let's have you start reporting back on what you heard in group two.
And the question for group two was the future.
What happens next? Exploring what happens post 2030 and beyond.
Kelly Moore, the floor is yours to summarize.
Thank you.
I just want to mention someone in our group left their purse on the back of the chair.
Make sure you go get your purse.
We had a great discussion and one of the key things that we came up as we go back to something more simplistic or do we hold the course? One of the challenges in changing it at this point is the idea that what if there's not support? And it unravels all of the work that has been done.
But then there's the idea that, well, can we hold people to these goals and have more accountability? How much time do I have? 2 minutes.
That was my first minute.
Yes.
Another idea that came up was having an Earth Cup prize, a really positive celebration of what has been achieved.
We've really been focusing on the things where we've fallen short and where externalities have impacted.
Could we just focus positively and move forward? That's one important suggestion.
The other was the idea of trying to cover too broad a spectrum.
I want to bring in an idea that came in later.
Around maybe with poverty, it needs to be broken down a little bit further to be realistic in terms of what would be signs that we're making a difference in improving poverty or no poverty, excuse me.
Maybe there could be some that we pull out and just unpack a little bit further if that makes sense.
Then, um, We also have the idea of just really creating realistic time for each goal.
Maybe it's recognizing that this is a longer term plan just in the light of where things are and there's those checking points as we go along.
Is there anything I should add? That concludes my presentation.
Thank you.
Thank you, Kelly.
Group one had Catherine and Wafa as facilitators.
Which one of you would like to speak for 2 minutes? We didn't solve the problems of the world, as I was just asked, but we've got a really fantastic group from around the world with enthusiasm for solving the problems.
One of the things, one thing that I think was really important is this idea of sharing information among national associations that how do we use the networks that already exist or establish other networks to share information around the world, which is important.
Then Rui, where is he? Thank you.
Has also been working with UNEP on a project that I think sounds just the thing that we need to be looking at.
If you wouldn't mind explaining with you, Np.
Yeah, we just had a session before this one with UNEP and Brazilian Ministry of Cities and there is a collaboration that is starting which is it's a pilot stage.
It's five governments through the Ministry of Planning that are looking at how the climate policy or climate matters are being addressed in their master planning instruments.
And so because the five countries that in this first phase are Brazil, Nigeria, Rwanda, Philippines, and Kenya.
The five cases will have very different approaches and configurations and the idea that UNEP is there like an observer and a facilitator and trying to understand what can be communicated and crossed from one country to the other.
I think this is a very interesting model that allows the governments to experience the kind of things that are missing and are gaps in their system.
Thank you, Group two.
Thank you.
Group one.
Thank you very much.
Sorry, I feel terrible when I have to keep moving everyone forward, but we just have to go through our agenda.
Group.
Group three, we had Frank and Asin who will be speaking for group three.
Okay.
I will try to sum up what we have talked in the group.
I think we have tried to talk about the strategies that we need to reach the capacity building.
The first one that we talked about was the coordinating and collaborating of the professionals.
In fact, this group is a very important base, but whole the subject has to be organized around this coordinating and collaborating between professionals.
Um, and secondly, we have talked about the vital role of planning and an adequate resource of planning systems and also investing in the planning education and the systems approach of the built environment and mobilizing all stakeholders.
So these were very important remarks to my point of view.
The education was an important topic that we have talked about both in terms of profession and in terms of the university education.
We just questioned the traditional conventional education system.
We may say how the younger generation is trying to involve in the professional skills in kind of today's challenges.
So I stressed on the fact that we have to provide the type of skills that we need within the, of course, education system.
In terms of, for instance, peer to peer learning practice might be an opportunity tools with AI might be an opportunity to advance in the um education system.
Also, hands on work is much more stressed and it's very important in building the capacity.
Suggestion was a very important one, enabling the passion and energy of the young generation.
We can say next generation.
Empowering the students to be a part of the actual platforms and the real hands on experiences, enabling that will build the capacity.
The holistic approach in terms and the lack of knowledge, how we take care of the lack of knowledge.
It was, in fact, important question.
I problem solved learning might be an opportunity in that sense, how we try to get rid of this lack.
The university practice gap as we always talk about how to make students ready for the profession.
We have to advance in that.
Maybe last remark was learning from the organizations that already has advancement in capacity building, so we have to maybe communicate more on that issue.
These were my notes, but I think also maybe Frank will add some remarks.
Thank you.
Yeah.
Just one sentence extra is while we are moving away from top down master plans to more collaborative participatory planning processes, we should build in capacity development, not as an ad hoc thing, but as a basic component of planning by collaborative learning.
I would like to and maybe HPF could through its working group, look at guidelines how to structure that process.
Thank you.
Group three.
Then group four, we had Lenore and Alyssa who will be speaking for group four.
We'll both speak.
Give a couple seconds.
But we started out and thanks everybody and our team.
If you can show your hand, that's great.
Wave your hand.
Thank you.
It starts out with, who are we? Then how do people in the South know about us? Because first, you got to know who you are.
That was really where it started.
I thank our colleague for saying that because that really is a profound thing.
If we want to grow the profession, we know that there's a gap, then we really got to get out the word that this exists if we want people to belong to it, and then how do we sustain going forward? It really was, is that we have to sustain by getting to know each other and from that building of each other building out and and then it leads back to three, two, and one.
It really does.
You've got to show the successes, you've got to show where the future is going to go, and then you've got to build that capacity as our colleague Frank has said.
Alyssa, building on that.
Thank you so much.
Actually, this is, I think the key thing.
I would like to support the summary that the questions and the answers from the group started after the explanation and going deeper what is habitat professionals Forum.
With this example, it gives us the understanding that first of all, this is the communication challenge.
The challenge of delivery of the information.
What is, what are the opportunities? Why to be the part of this? All the groups started to be interested and share that global South, especially those who are from this part of the world, they have their professionals, they have their knowledge and experience in resilient practices, resilient living there that they would like to share through the different professions.
But at the same time, it's important to know the pathway, how to become this part of the group.
Thank you.
Thank you very much and thank you everyone for participating in the groups.
We're going to move on to a plenary question.
Madam, can I complete the group 2/32.
It's possible? Yes.
If we can keep it short, sir.
30 seconds.
Now we want recommendation for the group two future, make connections.
With the new agenda because you have a ten years to implementation new agenda yet is very important to connect these commitments which the SDGs just suggests.
Thank you.
We're going to move into our plenary discussion question and there's a bit of a description that does go along with it.
The question is, if what needs to be done is well understood, why does delivery at scale, speed, and quality remain a challenge? A little bit of context around this is UN habitats ambition to deliver adequate, affordable and resilient housing at scale is increasingly constrained not by policy intent, but by professional capacity and coordination across planning, architecture, engineering, finance, construction, governance, and a growing mismatch has emerged between the complexity of today's urban challenges and the way the professionals are trained, deployed, and incentivized.
We want to talk about what are the real deal breakers holding back progress? Where do siloed education models, narrow economic frameworks, and short term investment logics actively undermine integrated long term urban outcomes? How does the professional mismatch affect human habitats ability to deliver housing in locations at scale and with the quality required, particularly in the face of accelerating climate risk? So our plenary question is going to explore how to inject urgency into the global capacity gap while elevating quality of life and environmental performance to the center of political and investment decision making.
I'm going to ask there are some spots here at the round table.
If you're interested in joining the table, please do.
And before you speak, I'll ask if you can just raise your hand.
If there was someone who wants to kick off this conversation, Nadyne, please go ahead.
Hello.
Thank you, Eleanor.
Thank you, everyone.
I need to reflect here from the region where I come from the Middle East and North Africa.
I'm currently the president of EFA for that region.
In our region, we have different experiences.
We have actually countries that have succeeded in delivering at scale, speed and quality housing.
One of those countries is Saudi Arabia where we have rich homeownership percentages of 60% within seven years of launching Vision 2030.
Currently 60,000 units have been delivered and what happened is it has been delivered because of the partnership between the private sector and the public sector.
What this means is that the planners and the architect and the designers and the whole professionals who are working on these projects really understood the idea that their role is to work with the private sector.
The role is not to act as a barrier to private sector investment.
This is very important as professionals.
We should look at the private sector as our ally, not as our enemy.
That's one of the good experiences.
The second good experiences is NUAE United Arab Emiates.
There is five social housing program and in these five social housing program, the quality has improved drastically and how it has improved because actually the designs are co created with the community and sometimes the community actually do the design and then they implement them on mass scale.
So this is very important.
How are we educating our students to work with community, not to act as experts coming from top down approaches and what makes work and how it works? So changing the layout of a house because we need more space for women and more private space for women is something that we need to educate our architects and urban designer on.
There are bad experiences as well.
I'm not going to mention the countries, but definitely one of them is using a house as a way to save money.
We have lots of empty plats bought by people and they are inflating the housing market.
What this means, it means that our financial frameworks need to link to our nature framework, needs to link to our urban planning framework.
We cannot anymore do planning and development processes that are separated from our investment and urban development processes.
They need to talk to each other and community engagement is part and parcel of that.
The force failure that we have in the region, and it's very important and everybody knows about it, the informal settlement.
Right? We need to work more into developing an Arab framework for informal settlement intervention.
I'm saying Arab because of the culture possibilities.
I invite every culture to think what could be a framework for intervening in their informal settlement.
The world settlement means we are humans and humans have certain cultural practices.
This is very, very important.
I end my intervention here by saying we need impact evaluation frameworks that are part of the budgets.
They are not separated from the budgets and impact evaluation framework needs to have social indicators, cultural indicators, and human indicators.
Thank you.
Thank you, Nady.
So excellent points.
Would someone else like to make an intervention? Demetrios, please go ahead.
Thank you, Eleanor.
My name is Demetrius.
I represent an organization called Tert who works really at the intersection between practice, community engagement, and knowledge.
I just wanted to build on the arguments that we just heard and talk about knowledge and communication of the knowledge that's being produced.
So as I hope, we were an associate member of the HF who also worked on the international participatory charter and the example I wanted to bring is that last year we worked with the community in Dunkirk in France to really translate that document into something which in French is called facile which means easy to read and understand.
And that was done really in participation with the with the local community.
For us, it means that getting to answering that challenge is really to finding a balance between participation as a core professional skill and something that is being taught.
I think it goes back to Frank's point about capacity.
I just wanted to emphasize that as well.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Please go ahead.
Thank you.
My name is Nelson Sal Junior.
I am from Brazil working P Institute.
I am a lawyer.
Two suggestions.
One is, I think it's necessary for this perspective of professionals, we start to think the multilateral or professionals also because I don't know, but I think here don't have any social worker, don't have health care professionals.
It's very important for Aj Urban.
Perspective, especially for the right to the city is the main topics we work.
This point I would like to erase? The second is this challenge for our different professions to work with communities because usually we work more with the governments, some other kinds of resources.
But I think the challenge for us is to have conditions to work with professionals in more close the communities to empowerment these communities, not for the demand your rights, reclaiming your needs for the governments.
I think this is very important.
Thank you very much for your intervention, Natalie.
I would like to point back to Elpe remarks at the beginning of the session, which I think addressed a version of the same question because often when we look at what needs to be done, we say, well, the resource, we don't have the resource.
It could be at the government and municipality level, but we're in a situation where we can point to the resources a problem.
But as Elpe was saying, we also have situations where rich states or rich cities seem to leave vulnerable citizens behind.
So pointing also to the discussion about the SDTs, we have SDT ten reduced inequality at the very heart of this challenge.
If we do not manage to reach for that goal, we will not manage to solve this question.
As we had, I'm looking over here to our colleague from Ghana who had intervention in the discussion about SDG number one, no poverty because of course, there's a reason that that is the very first SDG.
If we cannot prove that very first SDG, the one in the middle so central and the final one, the partnerships.
If we cannot advance towards those, we will never be able to deliver at speed, scale, and with quality.
Thank you.
Thoughts of others, Elizabeth, I can see your hand up.
Yes.
If you look at this question, then I think a lot is actually being developed at scale and speed, but the reason is because it's not well understood.
Maybe we have to go back to what is well understood.
Urbanization is happening fast, faster than governments can deal with sustainable urbanization, et cetera too much the focuses on units, on volumes, on buildings.
Clearly, housing is not well understood that is part of a much bigger approach to sustainable communities in short.
Thank you.
Please go ahead, Will.
Thank you, Eleanor Bjardi Garua.
Good day to everyone in traditional language from Sydney, Australia.
I'm HY William Chan.
I've been in elected office for city government in Sydney and talking and collaborating with mayors from around the world.
There's a big issue in terms of how we look at governance and especially multi level governance.
We as experts as professionals need to be at the political table.
We have to be at every level, whether that's national, but also more so in the local level where community needs, the types of housing supply, the types of housing diversity, that's where the lives of people's homes are being addressed.
Of course, local government is at the closest level to communities and citizens.
But we also are hamstrung because of the lack of alignment, the lack of consistency with regional and federal government, especially around financing.
How do we de risk access to loans and how do we work with international development funds and banking sector? I actually think the finance sector needs to be part of the habitat Professional Forum.
They need to be a professional in our industry, but also for us to look at how we can can have a voice and be seen and be heard to engage politically, but do so in a way that we can actually showcase the expertise.
You might know a lot of the city networks, mayors networks around climate, C 40 cities, UCLG, EClay local governments for sustainability.
There's regional ones as well.
Ones for culture, ones on misinformation, ones on sports and young people.
There is no mayors network for built environment.
There's no mayors network or city network for design excellence, and I think we need to be pushing at that level where we're talking to decision makers and elected officials.
Thank you.
Any other interventions around the table? Samira, you're going to bring us home for this section of the agenda.
I don't know, but I will try.
Thank you for the opportunity to speak.
Just on William's point, I did, I think, at the press conference mention the importance of finance and insurance, you remember, perhaps something to look at.
But I wanted to make two brief points to try and address the question, which is why delivery remains so difficult in spite of everything else which all of us are doing in our own sector.
If I can use resilience as an example because it's an area I know well.
I think one of the problems is that when you look at resilience, it is not built through isolated projects.
It's built through connected systems or at least should be built through connected systems.
So I think whether the issue is spatial planning, which is my field or climate adaptation, transport, housing, fragmented responses are not enough.
They will not take us to where we want to go.
At best, I think they are inefficient, and at worst, they work against each other and we do end up with a lot of professionals working against each other.
In the UK to give you a high level example, we need housing.
But when you propose a plan for a housing development, highway engineers that work for the council that wants to deliver the housing object to the highway intervention that the housing needs.
That's where we've ended up.
We need integration, and I think we need integration across sectors across institutions and so on.
I think our challenge is not necessarily technical.
I think it's a governance one.
We need built environment professionals working together as system integrators, as connectors, as advisors so that they can then provide the evidence, the spatial strategies, the infrastructure.
I think planning, you would expect me to say that as vice president of the Royal Town Planning Institute.
Planning is the profession that brings these disciplines together to make balanced decisions in the public interest and for future generations.
Done well It bridges communities and government and helps avoid future social, environmental and economic costs.
We should focus on that.
The cost of action or the cost of inappropriate action, and then the cost of inaction are all, really important.
But I think for planning to do all of this, the profession must be properly resourced, recognized, and given a seat at the top table.
It's a conversation I have picked up, for example, back to William's point with Emelia at UCLG this week in order to shape priorities.
But we can only do this in partnership with our colleagues in the other professional bodies.
Absolutely.
We have to work together.
Thank you.
Thank you for that.
And with that, apologies, Kelly, we're closing this section of the agenda and moving to the next section, which Lance will be taking over chairing.
Before we just go, I want to sincerely thank you for allowing me the honor to facilitate these conversations.
We've had some excellent points made this afternoon in interventions, and we just have to keep moving with the agenda.
I apologize.
We just have to keep moving.
Thank you.
Well, it's my pleasure now to introduce with pleasure and privilege, the Director of the Global Solutions Division of UN Habitat, Mr.
Ruff Ruff.
The floor is yours.
We're very pleased to have you with us.
We know it's a busy day.
Welcome.
Thank you very much.
Indeed, a busy day and a busy week, almost coming to the end.
But I first would like to congratulate both of you with your election as co chairs of the I wish you all the best and all the success in the next phase of the engagement in this endeavor.
I'm speaking here on behalf of the executive director, and would first of all, like to thank the Habitat Professionals Forum, all the partner professional organizations, local government representatives, academic institutions, and practitioners that have participated in this round table.
And I also recognizing the contribution of the two co chairs in the past for the strengthening of the engagement between habitat and the professional community over the past year or so.
I think the discussion today, as I hear, has demonstrated both the depth of the professional expertise in this room globally and also the urgency to strengthen professional capacities, coordination and collaboration across different contexts.
We would like to say that behind every successful housing policy, every resilient neighborhood and every inclusive urban strategy are indeed professionals translating ambition into implementation.
Professionals are not only technical actors, they shape how societies plan land, govern urban growth, design infrastructure, mobilize finance, manage risk, and respond to climate pressures.
The global housing challenge cannot be solved through political declaration alone.
It requires planners, architects, engineers, surveyors, economists, landscape professionals, developers, and other practitioners who are equipped, supported, and connected to deliver at scale.
The world today possesses substantial knowledge on what needs to be done to deliver adequate and resilient housing, yet delivery continues to fall behind because institutional systems, regulatory frameworks, financing structures, and professional capacities are not evolving at the same pace as urbanization and climate change.
In many rapidly urbanizing and climate vulnerable contexts, professionals operate under severe constraints, insufficient institutional support, fragmented governance systems, outdated regulatory frameworks, unequal access to training and technology, and limited opportunities for cross border learning and collaboration.
Closing the housing gap therefore means closing the global professional capacity gap.
Discussions today also highlighted the importance of expanding professional networks and resources deeper into the global south and to the national and local levels.
Some of the fastest urban growth in the world is occurring in places where professional systems remain under resourced despite demand.
Capacity development cannot be understood only as training individuals.
It also means strengthening institutions, professional ecosystems, local governments, universities, and regulatory environments that enable professionals to succeed.
The future of adequate housing will depend on whether knowledge, innovation, and technical resources can be shared more equitably across regions and contexts.
Professionals shaping cities today carry a major responsibility in ensuring that housing systems reduce vulnerability while improving quality of life.
Resilient planning, sustainable construction, circular economy approaches, nature based solutions, and participatory planning are no longer optional additions to housing delivery.
They are foundational requirements for long term urban scalability.
The challenge now is how to integrate these approaches systematically into professional education, standards, investment decisions, and everyday practice.
No single profession can solve the housing crisis alone.
The Habitat Professional Forum demonstrates the importance of collective platforms that bring together diverse professions around shared urban goals.
The complexity of today's urban challenges requires integrated approaches that bridge sectors, disciplines and scales.
UN Habitat sees the professional community as a strategic implementation partner in advancing our strategic plan 2026, 2029, the New Urban Agenda, and SDG 11.
Discussions today should not end at Wolf 13.
Recommendations emerging from this roundtable can help shape stronger collaboration between UN habitat, professional organizations, educational institutions, and governments.
The question before is no longer whether we understand the housing challenge.
The question is whether we are prepared to reorganize systems, partnerships, and professional practice at the scale and speed required.
Closing the global housing gap will require not only investment and political commitment, but also a new generation of professional collaboration grounded in inclusion, resilience, innovation, and solidarity.
UN Habitat stands ready to continue working with the Habitat Professionals Forum and partners to advance this shared agenda.
Again, congratulations to Eleanor, Mohamed, and Lance Kay Brown once again, and I wish you success in guiding the next phase of the engagement and collaboration.
Thank you.
Are we going back to the stipulation.
Thank you very much, Ralph.
Means, I want to first thank the election committee and the support that my colleagues that UN Habitat provided.
We went through a process over the last two months.
Thank you so much for all your active participation in the election cycle and we are delighted to of course have a new chair and co chair in the room.
Luckily, we don't have to actually move the chairs around.
They continue as Eleanor as chair and Lance as co chair.
So over this period, means Raf did lay out much of the agenda that you habitat would like to engage with with the new continuing team at HPF.
And we look forward to taking the partnerships to deeper, greater depth.
Though means, as I had said in the beginning, the habitat Professional Forum is one of the oldest longstanding stakeholder partnership that UN habitat has engaged with and has been one of the most productive, if I may say so stakeholder groups and we look forward to greater partnership because the challenges are getting more complex and more difficult.
Now I'd like to hand over first to Eleanor and then to Lance for a bit of their vision going forward.
Many thanks, Shia to.
Again, I want to express my appreciation to the Habitat Professional Forums members.
I really see my role as chair as a leader amongst leaders.
I see my role as one that helps to maintain the process and foundation that we all operate in.
But there are many leaders that make HPF move forward and bring such successful contributions to the World Urban Forum and ongoing between the World Urban Forum.
We will continue with our frameworks.
As I had mentioned earlier, we had a very successful announcements today with the recovering the future framework for transformation recovery from disasters.
There'll be a lot of work in terms of implementation with that, but we are also not forgetting about previous work that we've done as well with the International Participatory charter.
The more that we can get that work and more traction on the ground in local contexts, the better.
Um, and I clearly heard the points made today that we still have much work to do with habitat professionals form in terms of awareness and communication, and we will still endeavor to keep spreading the word as much as we can, and, um, finding ways to build new relationships and also very much having a focus on building those new relationships within Global South to make sure that we're continuing to fulfill our mandate with UN Habitat.
I also do want to express my sincere gratitude to UN Habitat of their support over the last two years, Subgato and Felix and Addy.
I don't think Ady's here with us today, but the support has been amazing and it's because of that support that we've been able to accomplish what we've been able to accomplish.
Many thanks to you.
I will pass it to Lance.
Thank you.
Thanks again, Eleanor and to repeat something that you said, we want to thank Shigato.
We want to thank you for your partnership, your collaboration, and all you've organized and contributed to our mutual activities and administrative business.
And thanks to your colleagues, again, Felix Aditia.
Thank you, of course, to Eleanor.
Thank you for your careful and patient leadership during the last two years, your valuable expertise in bringing people together and motivating them to collaborate and produce results.
This is obvious with the publication of the Framework for recovery and the plans for the International Landscape Convention, and it also builds on the legacy of the Habitat Professional Forum in previous works, including the roadmap and the works done under previous leadership, all of which whose shoulders we stand on, Thanks to everyone who's helped organize and participate in the roundtable, the working group leaders have moved their work forward.
There are some people whose names have not been mentioned, but amongst those that I would, Vincent Goodst and Catherine and Peter Curren coming and Eric Heritz, Christina Claire Wei Yang, and of course, Frank, to you.
You have all provided frameworks and guidance, energized capacity building, and given positive critique to the new urban agenda.
And planned activities in keeping with the mission of the UN Habitat and the habitat Professionals Forum.
So thank you all for working with us, working with us, not for us.
We all continue this very successful collaboration, and of course, see you in Mexico City.
And with that, I thank you and hope you stay safe and stay well.