by Joseph Roberts

Charles Kelly was appointed by Canada as commissioner general of the Secretariat for World Urban Forum 3 (WUF3), a UN Human Settlements Programme (Habitat) event, hosted this month in Vancouver, June 19 through 23. Kelly was involved in the first UN Habitat in 1976, as executive assistant to the president of the UN Conference on Human Settlements.

Common Ground: What is important for people to know about the UN World Urban Forum 3? People confuse it with several other events in June.
Charles Kelly: WUF3 is a meeting of civil society. I distinguish that from many traditional UN conferences, which are government-to-government meetings. So, national governments are represented, but it’s also state and local governments. Then, more broadly at the civil society level, the participants are planners, architects, civil engineers, developers and the private sector, in addition to the broad representatives of the non-governmental organizations.
Essentially, we’re putting everybody under one roof. Citizens are coming together to discuss ideas with the doers in society – the city builders, more largely writ. Since we’re not having a negotiation of policy, it’s an opportunity to have discussions about putting ideas to action, to share what works, lessons learned, mistakes made and how to develop new networks and new processes.
JR: Thirty years has passed since Habitat ‘76, where a lot of wonderful people met and shared some great ideas. What has been accomplished since then, what’s still to be done, and how have we done?
CK: It’s a mixed record on the last 30 years. National governments met separately in ‘76 and that led to the establishment of UN Habitat. That took a decade. It started off as an agency under the UN Environmental Program (UNEP) in Nairobi. It was only after the Istanbul conference in ‘86 that UN Habitat became a full agency of the UN with its own governing council.
There’s no question there’s been a lot of good policy work and a lot of activities. UN Habitat is not like UNEP or some of the other international agencies in that it doesn’t have a big pot of money or administer large global programs. It tends to be more of an advisory body.
Part of the nature of “urban” is that national governments really don’t do urban. The actual decision-making, by and large, really happens at local government levels, so the issues of water, sewage, housing and transportation – the broad mix of place-based decisions where people live in cities – tend to be local government decisions. There’s somewhat of a disconnect between the national governments, as represented in the international environment, and the reality of how decisions get made in local urban environments.
Thirty years ago we thought the world population would be about an additional billion people now, as opposed to what turned out to be the actual case. The world population now is about six and a half billion people, and 2005 represents the first time in history when half the people in the world lived in urban spaces. Over the last 30 years, while we’ve added over a billion and a half people, the challenge has been that they’ve disproportionately, through both migration and growth, moved into cities. At this stage, almost 20 percent of the world’s population lives in abject poverty.
We’ll add about another two billion people to the world’s population in the next 45 years. The bulk of that will be in cities. The question is how are we going to manage that? The decisions we’re going to make over the next 25 to 30 years will really determine what this planet looks like, as we try to adjust to the rapid urbanization and population growth.
JR: Why the migration into cities?
CK: Mostly it’s survival. With population growth, people moving to cities is, by and large, an expression of hope. They’re looking for jobs, for income. The cities are the engines of economic growth, where people can get an education and improve themselves.
JR: What really inspires you about this event?
CK: I think it’s the opportunity to bring the world to Vancouver. We live in one of the most advantaged environments and we don’t see or think about the things we’re not exposed to. If you look at the nature of development in China, or cities like Shanghai, where they add 500,000 people a year, it’s like they build a Winnipeg every year. There’s a radically different model in a democratic society such as India. It has equally tremendous problems of more and more people moving into cities, but it’s a democracy. The country has put substantially more resources over the years into the hinterland.
Brazil has a different development model and federation, and there are radically different social and economic circumstances in Africa. It’s important that there are different conversations amongst the developing nations.
Canada is a highly urbanized nation and 80 percent of our population lives in the cities. But our population is not growing in a significant way. To maintain our economic base we’re going to have to bring more people in, so we have a totally different context of what we’re dealing with and what the pressures are.
The real message is the extent to which, while we all live in our separate communities, we’ve learned in 30 years that the reality is these things are interconnected. It’s one planet. From an environmental perspective, decisions in China impact Canada. We’re related and no longer live in a world where we can say the consequences of massive coal-burning plants in Asia don’t matter to us.
That brings us back to the artificial division in the early ‘70s when, in Stockholm, they separated the physical environment and created the UN environment program and then moved human settlements off. We separated the physical science from the human dimensions of settlements. I think we’re trying to bring these things back together again. We must look at the physical environment in the context of the social and economic environments and integrate them now.
JR: The term civil society hasn’t been used that much lately. It seems there’s little time to be an involved citizen any more.
CK: It’s true, but on the other hand, Vancouver, and recently Calgary, has been one of the communities over the past 30 years that’s probably had a higher level of engagement in public participation in the urban landscape on a per capita basis than anywhere in the world.
First of all, I don’t think it’s any mistake that the GVRD’s Livable Region Plan was first drafted in 1976. Vancouver has evolved a set of methodologies on how to have a long-range plan. It’s spent almost the last 15 years finding a way to develop 30-year plans, so our urban planning frameworks are 30-year horizons, which is unique.
We also have 50 and 100-year plans, but the region, the GVRD, works inside of a set of planning and engagement guidelines, which has a 30-year horizon. Vancouver has established the Plus Thirty Network with 30 cities around the world sharing the development of 30-year plans. These are really important; if you want to start addressing some of the problems of urbanization, you need a longer-term vision. Infrastructure investments aren’t three to five year investments. You don’t make them in a single term of a municipal government.
The high level of public participation ensures that while political cycles may change, you can’t change the vision of the infrastructure plans without a broad base of public consensus. Literally tens of thousands of people participated in Vancouver in the last iteration of the Liveable Region Plan.
Over the last year, Calgary has put together a 30-year plan and directly engaged more than 18,000 Calgarians in the process.
I think the strongest message to come out of the Habitat Jam, where we had 39,000 people participating in a three-day, 72-hour, Internet-based event, was the need for people, who are most affected by the decisions in the communities in which they live, to be able to participate in those decisions.
That’s one of the messages from Canada. I feel very proud to be a Canadian and about this event. Canada is raising the bar. This will be the first nation state that’s been prepared to invest in this scale of civil society engagement, and we’re doing it in an area where Canada has real expertise. Canada runs excellent cities. People want to live in Canadian cities. They’re some of the most habitable cities in the world.
We can bring a lot to the world. We have the courage to deal with this in a way that’s open and inclusive. We can show with confidence that we trust citizens not only of our own country but the world when confronted with issues by treating these things in a true democratic way. I think you’ll find better decisions.
JR: There was such a critical mass of brilliance that changed people’s lives during Habitat ‘76.
CK: I think it’s really important to do that again. The really important thing about Vancouver is after 30 years; it’s time to reforge those networks. The world has come a long way in 30 years of network development from ‘76. Now there’s an opportunity for a new generation, schooled in a new set of ideas in an environment where we have a better understanding of sustainability from the perspective of what it means to run things in an integrated way. We’ve also had a revolution in technology that can bring benefits. We need to infuse the best technology with the best minds – eager, committed people – to apply the principles of sustainability in a democratic open way in cities around the world.
What’s required is a very significant paradigm shift. Vancouver is one of the few places in the world that has taken the concept of environmental sustainability and combined it with the economy and social issues, integrating them into a decision-making framework, which is an operating management principle in our region. You don’t know how rare that is. I really believe that’s the paradigm and the key.
There’s this fabulous book by James Surowiecki called The Wisdom of Crowds. The interesting dimension is that you’ll get a better solution if you mix the crowd. If you have the experts and the average person, you will approach the question in a different way. Your probability of success is based on the diversity of the audience. Beware of experts. Take a look at the wisdom of crowds. I think that’s a guiding principle for what we’re going to do at the World Urban Forum.
There are people coming from all over the world, who are participating in other events here at the same time. The WUF is the centrepiece, but the World Planning Congress is here, the International Architects, International Landscape Architects, the WIRO Commission are having meetings, World Youth and more.
Judith Marcuse is organizing a wonderful event called the Earth Festival (at the multi-institution campus) on Great Northern Way, with artists and seminars. The city is going to be infused for three weeks with the international energy of people coming to see and learn. I think it’s great, and I’m looking forward to a fabulous couple of weeks in June.

For more information about WUF3, visit www.wuf3-fum3.ca/en/home.shtml/