We the planners and organizers of the World Urban Forum 3 have given journalists a very large and daunting task: How to report stories that will interest your readers, viewers or listeners during a major international event spanning five days with over 400 on-site activities plus hundreds of offsite or related sub-events.
Take hope, this Blog will help sort this out. It will answer your questions and to point the way to events, issues and people that will maximize your ability to benefit from the World Urban Forum.
Like so much of what led to the creation of the World Urban Forums, this Blog is very much a conversation on what we collectively have learned about dealing with urban issues that are important to the world community. This third World Urban Forum is sponsored by UN-HABITAT, and it is an evolving dialogue.
The first World Urban Forum (WUF1) was held in Nairobi in 2002. This innovation in dialogue under the leadership of UN HABITAT Executive Director Anna Tibaijuka reached out to Habitat Partners and the broader NGO community to seek advice on UN Habitat’s program, services and issues of responsibility.
World Urban Forum 2 (WUF2) was held in Barcelona in September of 2004. It was a highly successful expansion of WUF1 with over 4000 participants. New forms of meetings in networking sessions were enthusiastically attended, and serious efforts to produce expert opinions were very much appreciated by those attending. The organization and management of the first two WUF events was largely a UN Habitat effort.
Moving WUF3 to Canada represents a serious step up not only in terms of scale, but also in terms of sponsorship. This will be the first WUF fully hosted by a nation state (Canada), and with a true partnership in management and coordination. Canada has contributed about $30 million as host and partner with UN Habitat to take the World Urban Forum to a new level of dialogue.
The GLOBE Foundation of Canada, a world leader in the management of international conferences and expositions, was engaged to manage all the logistical aspects of the Forum.
Canada’s willingness to be the first nation state to take on this host/partner responsibility is reflective of Canada and Vancouver’s role in hosting the first Human Settlements conference (Habitat ’76) which took place 30 years ago. That event led to the formation of UN HABITAT.
Vancouver has not forgotten its contribution to establishing a new paradigm for urban environmental matters and participants of WUF3 will see firsthand how the City of Vancouver has put many of the lessons of the Human Settlements Conference into practice.
The huge scale of WUF3 is reflective of the need for so many diverse conversations to occur. This is NOT a UN policy conference or a meeting of nation states to decide something, or to agree on a communiqué. This is an unparalleled engagement of civil society- governments (national, state/provincial, region and city), urban professionals, business leaders and community activists.
It is people talking to people, exchanging ideas and experiences on how to plan, design, manage and build more sustainable cities.
The focus of WUF3 is “ideas to action”, which means the lessons learned, the mistakes made, the new approaches tried, the technologies employed, will all be on the table for discussion.
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