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n 2011, the World Bank initiated the Partnership for Sustainable Cities, a group of leading urban actors with a mission to collaborate on city development around the world and foster city-led sustainable development. This synthesis paper, Building Sustainability in an Urbanizing World, is a product of the partnership's early discussions. In this paper, members of the partnership have collaborated to identify and analyze the issues that guide their work together. The report summarizes the sustainability issues faced by cities and points toward the road ahead. It reviews successes in policy as well as investment and discusses what is needed to reach out to the rapidly growing cities of the developing world and make them effective users of existing knowledge. Examples of programs established by the partners are described in both the text and the Annexes. This report aims to be useful to the partners who contributed with knowledge and experiences, to cities who may benefit from an honest discussion of what works and what needs improvement, and to businesses and development practitioners entering the wide world of sustainable cities.

World-Class Buildings For The Underserved, At Under $10k INNOVATION BY DESIGN THE EUROPEAN PRIZE FOR ARCHITECTURE HONORS NORWAY'S TYIN TEGNESTUE, WHO SPECIALIZE IN LOCALLY SOURCED, LOCALLY BUILT PROJECTS IN THE DEVELOPING WORLD.

Thirty years ago, Curitiba, Brazil unveiled a master plan to address urban issues with environmentally-friendly public transit and social programs. FRONTLINE/World Fellow Tim Gnatek took to the busses, walkways and streets of the now world-renowned city for a second look at what urban planners and environmentalists around the globe point to as a world model.

In his just-released Planet of Cities, Shlomo Angel argues that urban policy-makers and planners must do more to meet the challenge of urbanization. Angel, who is a member of the Urbanization Project at New York University and who conducted his research as a visiting fellow at the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy, provides a detailed, data-driven analysis filled with maps of world urbanization patterns, as well as charts and tables documenting the challenges facing global cities. He took time out from his busy schedule to talk to Atlantic Cities about the key challenges facing our increasingly urban world.

Open knowledge repository (World BanK)

The World Digital Library is connected to libraries worldwide and provides free access to a large number of materials.

Data, Country-level. Extremely useful

Spain may be facing significant economic and political challenges these days, but Barcelona's city-building remains one of the best models in the world. Few cities inspire my thinking more. Thus it was a fitting location for the second Global Smart City Expo/Congress, and my invitation to speak was a good excuse to return, and share some of the best "steal-able" lessons. The Congress may have talked a lot about urban technologies, but Barcelona reminds us how smart the fundamentals are when it comes to making great cities.

In a piece called The Beauty of Urban Planning from Space, the Sustainable Cities Collective highlights views from space of uniquely designed street pattern designs in various cities around the world. There are ten examples that illustrate the zenith of urban planning. As attractive as the street patterns are, they highlight the inevitable inability of designers, or anyone else for that matter, to influence much more than small changes in the overall urban form.

The City 2.0 website is a platform created to surface the myriad stories and collective actions being taken by citizens around the world. We draw on the best of what is already being discovered by urban advocates and add grassroots movers and shakers into the mix. What's emerging is a complex picture of the future city--a place more playful, more safe, more beautiful, and more healthy for everyone. http://www.ted.com/pages/tedx_tedxcity

Macro forces continue to have an impact on the global influence of cities. Political power is rotating back from West to East, and with economic drivers having shifted from agrarian to industrial to information-based, more people live in cities than in rural areas. While New York, London, Paris, and Tokyo still rank among today's top cities, it appears that Beijing and Shanghai may become significant rivals in the next 10 to 20 years. These are among the highlights of the 2012 Global Cities Index (GCI), a joint study performed by A.T. Kearney and The Chicago Council on Global Affairs. In addition, a panel of academic and corporate executive advisors informed and challenged the study results. We've expanded this year's study; in addition to classifying the current global influence of 66 cities, we have also developed an Emerging Cities Outlook (ECO) to project which emerging-market cities may eventually rival the established global leaders for dominance. Figure 1 summarizes the 2012 results, along with the rankings from our 2008 and 2010 findings of major world metropolitan areas. (The censorship metric added in 2010 affected the positions of several emerging-market cities.) In the first section of this report, we explore the results and implications of the 2012 GCI rankings. The second section summarizes the results of our Emerging Cities Outlook, which analyzes the strengths and weaknesses of cities in developing markets by examining the rates of change and key factors that will affect their ability to capitalize on future globalization trends (see Appendix: About the Study).

good read in general about keeping things simple and not assuming too much.

News and analysis of cities around the world

CGLU, seat in barcelona. Llop invovlved. 

Another city network dedicated to the dissemination of strategic planning is UCLG, with more than a thousand member cities. In a recently published guidebook, UCLG (2010) offers detailed recommendations for the implementation of strategic plans, and it seeks to influence institutions such as the World Bank, the Inter-American Development Bank, the International Monetary Fund, several UN organizations, as well as the Commission of the European Union, requesting them to "encourage strategic planning processes providing human, financial and technical resources primarily to small and medium sized cities" (p. 21).

Goodyear has a knack for pulling together all the latest information on land use issues and presenting it in a no-nonsense way. Her latest article explains the absurdity of the so-called "War on Cars", when cars will obviously be part of the mobility solution for a long time to come. Grist is a voice of sanity in the sometimes chaotic world of "green media."

Un Habitat intranet Library - Journals (go to parent for more) Cities (Science Direct) Habitat International (Science Direct) Journal of Urban Economics (Science Direct) Land Use Policy (Science Direct) Progress in Planning (Science Direct) World Development (Science Direct) 

LSE Cities is an international centre at the London School of Economics and Political Science that carries out research, education and outreach activities in London and abroad. Its mission is to study how people and cities interact in a rapidly urbanising world, focussing on how the design of cities impacts on society, culture and the environment. Through research, conferences, teaching and projects, the centre aims to shape new thinking and practice on how to make cities fairer and more sustainable for the next generation of urban dwellers, who will make up some 70 per cent of the global population by 2050.

Disclaimer: This web site contains data tables, figures, maps, analyses and technical notes from the 2010 Revision of the World Population Prospects. These documents do not imply the expression of any opinion whatsoever on the part of the Secretariat of the United Nations concerning the legal status of any country, territory, city or area or of its authorities, or concerning the delimitation of its frontiers or boundaries.

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