Reflections on the World Urban Forum & the challenges facing urban planning practice

 By Tim Stoner, Managing Director Space Syntax

I’ll soon be tasting the best potatoes I’ve ever eaten. Not because they’re the most expensive, the most hyped on social media, the smallest - nor even the largest - but because I’ve grown them myself. I know the soil they’re growing in, the water that’s poured on them, the pesticides that aren’t and the general care they’re being given.

Which naturally, or not, led me to thinking that these principles should apply equally to urban planning practice.

At last month’s World Urban Forum in Baku, Azerbaijan I joined discussions of the recently established Global Urban Data Coalition, an initiative of UN-Habitat (United Nations Human Settlements Programme). At the heart of our deliberations was the potential for Earth Observation Data to improve the planning of cities. Surely a no-brainer? Yet, as is often the case at such gatherings, the obvious needs to be challenged, starting with the definition of ‘Earth Observation’.

I remember when I first heard the phrase, my assumption was that Earth Observation Data was generated by satellites. Indeed, at our preparatory meetings in Brussels in April I saw impressive presentations from the European Space Agency, Airbus and others showing increasingly detailed mapping of urban settlements and their wider settings. These observations revealed rapid rates of urban growth and shrinkage, water availability and scarcity, soil quality, and tree canopy cover.

In a separate session at the World Urban Forum, I heard from Anne Wambui of Slum Dwellers International about the ways in which community-generated data gives local people, especially women and girls, a stronger voice in planning discussions. How initiatives such as sanitation mapping highlight gender injustice issues often overlooked by top-down planning processes.

Anne also spoke about the importance of communities maintaining ownership of the data they’ve created, not only for political leverage but also for the pragmatic necessity of ongoing maintenance and quality control. After all, local people are local experts. Trained and equipped, communities add capacity to professional planning infrastructures that are commonly scarce in rapidly urbanising parts of the majority world.

Indeed, the professional capacity challenge was raised in a number of other sessions at the World Urban Forum, including in remarks by former Executive Director of UN-Habitat Maimunah Mohd Sharif. She presented data showing that whereas in Europe there is 1 architect for every 1,500 people, in Asia this figure is 1:17,000 and, in Africa, 1:30,000. The figures for planners are even more stark.

I heard calls from speakers for the expansion of planning schools, for planning policy-focused schools (which specialise in words) to be better at teaching physical and spatial design skills (which is ultimately how words are translated into on-the-ground actions). And vice versa. For all schools to be more focused on practice and less distracted by discussions of theory. And for planning to be better linked to finance.

These calls for a scaling-up and sharpening of focus were echoed by speakers from professional planning institutes.

The challenge of supporting local communities in rapidly urbanising places – where villages are becoming towns and towns are becoming cities - is enormous. Without being defeatist, the implication is that the need for trained planners won’t be met by traditional urban planning institutions. Something more is needed.

Which links us directly to the value and benefits of doing something yourself: of community-generated data.

The first opportunity I could see at the World Urban Forum is to bring people out of their separate sessions and into the same conversation. To their credit, UN-Habitat is already doing this but more can always be done. The need to link institutions with communities is a pressing one.

The second opportunity is to formally acknowledge that community-generated data is Earth Observation Data, and for this to be clarified at every opportunity - not left to naïve misinterpretation, like my own initial assumptions. Again, the UN gets close, recognising in its own definitions that data gathered by bird-watchers can be considered Earth Observation Data data. It’s just a short editorial step to include data gathered by communities in that definition.

And then the third opportunity is the biggest of them all: not only to acknowledge the value of community-gathered data but to augment the skills of local people with training in data analysis and urban planning. To harness the potential of satellites and send training programmes to places that are otherwise remote from education services. To augment the local expertise of community developers with algorithm-driven planning tools to guide future planning decisions. And, in doing so, to address the profound shortage of professional planning capacity by cultivating local know-how.

This is the benefit of a ‘home grown’ approach. It’s not only the route to better food; it’s also the process by which the potentials of top-down and bottom-up Earth Observation can be combined with community training to address the the real needs of urbanising places. 

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