This time is in ENGLISH! haha, I decided this post will be held in english because I already had this note in that language :) please feel free to comment what you think about the reflection notes.
Last november was held the:
3rd World Summit of Local and Regional Leaders 2010
Mexico City 16-20 November 2010
The World Summit of Local and Regional Leaders 2010 was held in Mexico City with two days of parallel events and three days of the World Congress. The parallel events were organized by: Cities Alliance¹, FLACMA² and UN-HABITAT and UNESCO³.
At the opening ceremony the mayors of Mexico City, Paris, Istanbul, Quito, San Jose, Lisbon, Johannesburg, Guangzhou, Seoul, Stuttgart, Montreal, the rector of the National Autonomous Mexico´s University, UN-HABITAT Director, Nobel Prize 2007 Rajendra K. Pachauri, between others shared the stage. Over 3000 guests, around 2000 delegates over 114 countries, attended the event.
The topic that opened the summit was the climate change: “Cities are necessary to combat climate change. The solution is in cities”. After that call to responsibility, the importance of cities in the countries development took place:
“Be the change you want to see in the world”, taking Gandhi´s philosophy.
The way of taking the city was with equity, development, sustainability and as a finance center. 15% of the wealth in the world is in cities, and one out of six people live in slums.
“Moving local actors, we move the world”.
How do you imagine your city in 2030:
Johannesburg: “we are building the city of the future; we need a common vision, a global thinking. The challenges are similar but with different repercussion”. Poverty, underdevelopment and rural migrations make the stance of an integrated community goal, creative companies and the reach of local training and knowledge. Africa is going out of a 17 year recession.
Lisbon: “a cosmopolitan city”. After de 2006 budget crisis that affected larder, housing and improve the social pressure, the mayor aspire to a modern Lisbon.
Seoul: to achieve a total technologic government. And e-government that maintains the citizen informed and makes the urban life easier.
Guangzhou: “a happy society”. The goal for the Chinese city is to provide services and promote values to reach happiness.
They remarked the importance of the financial factor that is the first to exclude communities. The creative innovations, the city letter, the participatory budget, are examples of an inclusion tools that avoids the broke of the city in social terms. Reach the culture of The Right to the City: made of technical methodologies of social integration in the city processes.
The “Letter of the City” was a theme that many cities consider as the tool to commit to citizenship and reinforce it. Do politics through this, implementing hard changes. A tool as a human development initiative in four directions: professional formation and implementation of techniques, political proximity, social politics and local development.
Reflection 1: Is the Right to the City the right to centrality?
The debate then turned to the relation urban-rural. Cities don´t take in consideration the rural solidarity, was pointed. Rural areas are now in the scene in terms of the decentralization of city advantages and regional planning. A Chilean representative called for south to south cooperation for regional development.
Reflection 2: Can food supply sovereignty balance the world socio-economic structure? Decentralization looks forward to stop megalopolis generation?
“Medium and small cities, those who nobody knows about it, are going to grow faster in the future”. “Our century is about global cities”. Mayor of Istanbul
General reflection 3: What rules are the best to follow in a global scale demographic explosion?
International organizations suggest: decentralization, democracy and local responsibility, urbanization. And the debate was: How to formalize irregular housing? Informal work gives even more employment opportunities than formal in Asia and Africa. Public housing construction is efficient that private developments; were pointed. If the city does not represent people, they would generate ways; the problem is the great lack of local governments capable to the challenges of urbanization. Bilbao´s Mayor: “in my city, informal jobs are not attractive, that´s a way to avoid illegality and provide opportunities”.
Reflection 3: Is sustainable the reach of the millennium goals?
Under the topic of human rights, inclusion, justice, social wealth, the debate turned to speculation in the world cities. Jordy Borja said: “Without a ground policy there won´t be a housing policy. It is not licit the benefit of speculation. It is necessary a ground policy in national and even international level”. The Mayor of Montreal expressed that the solution of the world problems are in cities, but that many processes depends of national relationships and structure. That people is threaten by change but that it has to be seen as a way. As the Casa Blanca´s Mayor suggested: pass from state control to municipal control. Local development seems like an alternative to the macro structural relations.
3 See note/document in ThisBigCity: http://thisbigcity.net/post/2310910652/urban-inclusiveness-for-international-migrants
