THE 60 PRIORITY ACTIONS OF 'THE CITY WE NEED NOW!' 

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Health and well-being 

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1. Implement the 15-minute city concept wherever possible.  

2. Ensure green spaces are designed and established to foster local biodiversity, sports and provide essential ecosystem services, accessible by all residents and cultural spaces to promote mental and spiritual health. 

3. Revisit the city plans with a health lens to limit the spread of infectious diseases: densities for overcrowding, centering the pedestrian and providing infrastructure supportive of human-powered transportation, including alternative mobility modes such as mass transit, adequate public space, sufficient health infrastructures and rapidly convertible areas/facilities for emergencies, access to food supply.  

4. Ensure proper sanitation and access to clean water to increase pandemic-resilience among all areas and populations.  

5. Increase non-automobile-dependent access and mobility choices linking human communities with parks and public spaces. 

6. Create an emergency helpline for citizens to access mental health facilities. 

 

 

Peace and safety 

 

1. Put in place and implement inclusive urban safety and security policies and strategies addressing all areas of the city, including marginal urban, peri-urban and other settlements, to avoid piece-meal neighbourhood interventions that can displace crime.  

2.  Strengthen the capacity of local governments in understanding and integrating safety and security in plans and budgets, the development of inclusive and participatory mechanisms, the monitoring and evaluation of interventions, and the use of knowledge-based practices.  

3. Create fora and living labs for people from different communities, ages and gender identities to exchange and foster a culture of peace, cooperation and trust amongst citizens and institutions. These will ensure that urban safety and security policies and strategies are constantly updated to reflect on-the-ground realities and emerging problems. 

4. Ensure that all urban safety and security measures, initiatives and investments address the specific interests and needs of women and girls, children and youth, and persons in vulnerable situations, including migrants, unhoused populations, people of color, persons with disabilities and older persons, in order to leave no one behind when addressing social and gender norms surrounding safety and security.  

5. Advocate, collaborate, mobilize resources and build capacities of stakeholders to build partnerships to prevent, respond to, and end ethnic, gender and racial based violence.  

 

 

Climate adaptation and resilience 

 

1. Engage in urgent and coordinated climate action and invite organizations to recognize the global climate emergency with declarations paired with meaningful, goal-oriented actions. 

2.  Request governments to enact adequate and effective laws and regulations and facilitating sound climate, informed planning and risk reduction, access to secure tenure, the provision of infrastructure, basic services, and shelter. 

3. Collaborate towards urgent implementation and commit to innovative climate actions and solutions. 

4. Gather effective scalable solutions and innovations to create greener and sustainable cities to address the climate change challenges.   

5. Engage national governments and local authorities to create conducive enabling environments that incentivizes all stakeholders, including the private sector, to play their part in manifesting effective climate action. 

6. Advocate, collaborate, mobilize resources and build capacities of stakeholders to better implement, scale-up and replicate solutions with feedback loops to continuously improve, refine, and share effective climate action strategies and practices that show respect for all living things. 

 

 

Inclusion and gender equality 

 

1. Stimulate educational and cultural activities to foster social cohesion, tolerance, based on cultural diversity and human rights. 

2.  Establish gender mainstreaming into all stages of policy-making (preparation, design, implementation, monitoring and evaluation).  

3. Provide emergency housing for women to tackle violence (domestic, on the working place, symbolic, etc).  

4. Guarantee the means and mechanisms that enable everyone, without any kind of discrimination, to participate in the local decision-making, through processes such as community consultations, community contracting and participatory and gender-responsive decision-making and budgeting. 

5. Encourage faith-based organizations co-committed to the common good and TCWNN to maximize their influence and impact to implement TCWNN.  

6. Monitor inclusion or exclusion and ensure there are protocols for disaggregated data (gender, age, ethnicity or race, socio-economic status) to inform monitoring and assess health, living conditions, access to urban services and well-being.  

 

 

Economic opportunities for all 

 

 

1. Facilitate sustainable innovation and inclusive prosperity and promote the right to decent work, livelihoods and shared prosperity through skills development, job training and policies that support non-discriminatory employment through public  private, and civil society collaborations.  

2. Expand investment in quality education and workforce development to foster job creation.  

3. Develop incentives to increase job creation and upskilling, including creation of economic development zones, apprenticeship programs, on-the-job training opportunities (including focus on youth, women and other vulnerable under-employed populations), and innovative programs that will foster broader access to economic opportunity. 

4. Expand investment in sustainable infrastructure and services to increase access to all and support livelihoods.  

5. Increase  the bankability of infrastructure investment and public-private partnerships by prioritizing the development of feasibility studies in urban infrastructure with these as included criteria.   

6. Increase sub-standard housing upgrading programs as part of post-pandemic recovery plans and incorporate, in addition to health and safety measures, fuel switch strategies that end fossil fuel dependency for cooking and heating, as well as other green strategies that reactivate productive green activities, such as greywater paired with permaculture, to support food sovereignty and the circular, solidarity, and care economies.  

 

 

Culture and identity 

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1. Increase investment and capacity towards the protection of natural and cultural heritage of cities and human settlements against the adverse effects of climate change, natural and man-made impacts and disasters. 

2. Develop city and metropolitan region wide planning policies and statutory mechanisms to protect the city’s tangible and intangible cultural heritage. Develop and implement living heritage frameworks to support the expansion and renovation of cities and metropolitan regions.  

3. Support the conservation and regeneration of cultural heritage in relation to the multidimensional benefits it can produce.  

4. Create new urban space with new art and greenscaping within which culture can be encouraged, using trees to provide protection from the impacts of urban heat islands and extreme heat events. 

5. Use Culture, Arts and Creativity as catalysts and enabler for integration, education and social participation and cohesion. 

6. Create ‘living labs’ to transform degraded and damaged historical areas/sites into new attractions and "places" as a means to generate intangible value for reorienting lifestyles and behaviours/culture and demonstrate the value of cultural circular ecosystems.  

 

 

Local governance

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1. Enact laws allowing community participation and public disclosure in order to establish appropriate accountability relationship between local government bodies and the citizens. Also establish community participation funds to support community-led initiatives.  

2. Implement the principle of subsidiarity, that matters ought to be handled by the smallest, lowest, or least centralized competent authority, by building up capacity at all levels to strengthen bottom-up decision making participatory processes throughout the entire policy, implementation and review cycle to collectively define, review, implement, and oversee city priorities, strategies and actions.  

3. Strengthen the role of community leaders and grassroots territorial organizations in defining urban initiatives and projects given their pivotal role and inside knowledge of multifaceted communities.  

4. Increase ‘engaging’ urbanism approaches to ensure the participation of citizens towards the life activation of places, prototyping of solutions and evaluation of experiences before implementing solutions. 

5. Adopt new user-friendly technologies to facilitate communication, support planning and increase the transparency of decisions and actions. 

6. Continue implementing the decentralization of territorial finances in order to increase autonomy and implementation at the local level. 

 

 

Urban planning and design 

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1. Revisit planning and design practices to address the evolving societal and environmental needs in terms of accessibility, walkability, mobility, energy and resources: increasing proximity, curtailing urban sprawl expansion to focusing on just urban renewal and infill development, reducing the urban-rural dichotomy to embrace a metropolitan and regional planning approach.  

2. Re-orient the automobile-oriented, fossil fuel-dependent business model used in urban planning towards one focused on humans, walkability, quality of life, and affordability in city design and planning instruments. 

3. Refocus urban planning and design practices to make better use of the natural capital by developing nature-based solutions, increasing the CO2 sequestration capacity of places, and focusing on improving micro-climates.  

4. Encourage new urban planning regulations and incentives that focus on the use of nature-based solutions to bring green spaces back into cities, restoration of natural and working lands that surround and support human communities, while monitoring the benefits that these can produce (health, environmental, social, cultural, aesthetic, etc.).  

5. Introduce urban planning regulations to limit and prevent new land consumption. 

6. Encourage the reuse of underused and abandoned spaces and buildings to limit the waste of resources and land resulting from new construction.  

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Housing, services and mobility 

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1. Follow the UN Guidelines for Implementing the Right to Adequate Housing, a set of implementation measures, including homelessness and the unaffordability of housing, migration, evictions, climate change, the upgrading of informal settlements, inequality and the regulation of businesses.  

2. Enable a continuum of land rights for security of tenure through data collection and documentation with communities, and prevent forced evictions.  

3. Explore new sustainable and affordable home building technologies, such as 3D printing, to meet housing demand, and increase investment to strengthen the public, social and affordable rental housing in all communities.  

4. Encourage land trusts and cooperatives to deliver housing and economic opportunity with ownership options affordable to all community members, including new migrants, providing for generational wealth-building opportunities. 

5. Continue revisiting mobility by exploring the potential of multi-modal travel, reducing the use of space reserved for automobile infrastructure and access to underutilized urban space. Invest in charging stations for electric vehicles, including widely-available curbside and other publicly-accessible locations, to encourage their use and similarly incentivize the transition of the public transportation sector to adopt more climate-friendly low-carbon sustainable mobility. 

6. Decentralize essential service delivery to maximize accessibility by all segments of the population. Expand digital infrastructure and affordable technologies enabling everyone to participate in digital communications and education.  

 

 

 

Learning and innovation 

 

1. Introduce monitoring systems for all city projects to assess their impacts and success before possible replication. Such monitoring systems should be based on transdisciplinary assessments. 

2. Make use of new visual mapping tools for citizens to better communicate on new projects and visualize budget allocation in the city. 

3. Develop laboratories of innovation for public policy and project development tapping into the existing multi-actor, multiscale and multimedia initiatives that have shown impetus for collective action during the Covid-19 pandemic. 

4. Link people in the informal sector and micro-entrepreneurs to foster larger value chains using new information and communication technologies. 

5. Support peer-learning amongst stakeholders and work with education and multi-sectoral partners to create systems for open-source and open-data information sharing. 

6. Establish platforms for the collection of good practices, with evidence on costs and impacts produced.