WUF3 will be the first time that a World Urban Forum has been hosted with the full support of a nation state. The previous two forums were essentially UN events funded by the United Nations with relatively small donor contributions.
In the case of WUF3, Canada raised the bar and said we must engage governments, the private sector, the civil society, municipal authorities, and ordinary citizens to bring new level of energy to discussions on the problems of urbanization.
To this end, Canada and UN Habitat designed WUF3 such that citizens groups and other non-governmental organizations will be treated as full partners in dialogue process. Treating non-governmental organizations as equals to national governments introduces a whole new paradigm for United Nations Dialogues. No more talking heads or canned speeches. WUF3 will be people talking to people – with no filters between urban experts and leaders of cities and the people who live in those cities - even those that live in slums.
The WUF3 Program will put this principle into practice in a very meaningful way. Initially, high-profile plenary sessions will set the stage for key themes and sub themes of urban sustainability. These will be followed by Dialogue Sessions moderated by journalists and professional moderators that will take place twice a day between Tuesday and Thursday during the week of the Forum.
Top experts on urban issues will open the Dialogues to discuss issues such as: slum upgrading and affordable housing; empowering civil society to engage in local governance; financing municipal infrastructure; ensuring urban safety and security; upgrading urban planning and management; and finding renewable energy solutions for cities.
The journalists and professional moderators will then ensure that members of the audience are actively engaged in the search for solutions. I think it important to note that while urban experts will be part of these Dialogues these sessions are designed primarily as opportunities for citizen participants to put forward their own actionable ideas.
To facilitate this process WUF3 organizers distribute to all participants a synthesis of 75 of the over 600 actionable ideas that were identified in the HABITAT JAM process that in December 2005 engaged over 40,000 people world wide in an Internet-based discussion of WUF 3 themes.
The core theme of WUF3 is Our Future: Sustainable Cities – Turning Ideas into Action. By maintaining the dialogue for sustainability at the level of people talking to people, we will be able to turn the ideas of those most affected by the problems of urbanization into tangible actions and practical solutions.
I would like to see the list of the 600 actionable ideas for Urban sustainability. Solutions to problems of entrophy can range from surrender, antitheses, to syntheses and synergies. In particular I would like to see from the Jam those actionable ideas that can be moved on immediately by the individual and masses of the world, emphasizing bottom up rather than top down. I would like to see debate and further polling function to indicate the strength of the public's democratic will, or anarchic if necessary, on our ideas for action rather than some computer program or somebody else's judgement. We desire, need, and fight for the freedom to live our own lives, to be, other wise being the guinea pigs of failures, grist, and unwilling supporters, hosts or minions of tyrannical systems and their lackeys.
In defining specifically where the status quo may be inhibiting or be obstructing the bottom up (freedom of actions) would be politically useful for all parties and the individuals they would govern.
We observe the ramifying complication of the abstract system of knowledge and application on the mutable foundations of scientific research and reality manifestation and are baffled by the bullshit. The symptomatic, manifestations of system entropy, from our underlying idiosyncratic existential disease, are analogues of the disease/health industry in general.
Those that have greatest influence are making their careers and monies out of the problems, hard to imagine them as keenly making themselves redundant. Our peaceful evolution as a society, a community, an ecology, and a global economic system on all levels is in the balance. The vertigo of desperate need, destructive criticism, rampant enthusiasm for the banal, inappropriate resource application, lack of dynamism in appropriate global developement systems, is anchored firmly in the legally constrained actions of the individual human beings by their governments. We are slaves if we aare not doing what we wish reasonably to be doing by the actions of the state. That the welfare of the world and all of history should have come to this crossroads, that we are waiting for the light to change, while our petty interests in practice, working against our larger, our epochal interests are paused erroneously. Therefore let us proceed down the road to prosperity and happiness, and leave this international disgrace. I will take responsibility for it and so can we all in fair measure, and leave our children and history the judgement.
Pat answers
Posted by: Patrick Britten | June 25, 2006 at 23:21