A NEW URBAN AGENDA, AND A NEW NEXUS: HABITAT 3 MEETS IN QUITO
By Wayne Roberts
Like all United Nations documents prepared for conventions, the New Urban Agenda prepared for Habitat 3 conference in Quito, Ecuador, should be read on two levels.
At the surface level, there are very general expressions of convictions and hopes for an action agenda — 175 specific items, in the case of the New Urban Agenda.
Beneath the surface level is careful wordsmithing that expresses some 40 events that went into the making of this New Urban Agenda — a whole lot of jockeying, deal-making and pivoting; a pile of new understandings about what’s involved in an action plan for a majority of the world’s people who are now living in cities; and a series of new partnerships that will try to make sure something happens on the action front afterwards. A large number of people and countries fed into the negotiating process, and some issues were being worked on right up to the September 10 date when the draft statement to be presented to the Quito conference was released. This flows out of action and will flow into actions, so read it as you would read any process in flux.
This is what people are talking about when they refer to policy as an iterative process. It gets down and dirty, and those who want to influence policy need to get their foot in one or another door and keep it there.
The New Urban Agenda will not have much weight as binding law. But a careful reading of the wordsmithing shows how it creates the political equivalent of air rights and public spaces that provide some wiggle room and permission slips for a rising generation of urban thinkers, planners, coalition and partnership builders, advocates and activists.
Thomas Forster has been my guide to this subterranean level of the New Urban Agenda, offering signposts to look for when assessing what’s written between the lines and how it might have long-term impact at ground level — far below and beyond the mountain tops of the Quito conference.
I got to know Forster a decade ago, when I served on the board of the US-based Community Food Security Coalition, and he was our lobbyist, moving a food security agenda in Washington. I shadowed him for a week while he showed me what it meant to work in what he called a “porous political system.”
Ten years on, Forster is a senior policy fellow for the Washington-based policy shop, Eco-Agriculture Partners. He has been working as one of the minions bringing people together through the UN’s porous systems for both last year’s Milan Urban Food Pact and this year’s New Urban Agenda.
Food is Forster’s special thing, as it is mine, and food gives quite a panoramic view of what’s been going on with the New Urban Agenda, and what may soon be the talk of the town.
You will notice that food security is identified right off the top, in the New Urban Agenda’s clause 2, the scene-setter for the whole document. You will also notice that food gets a specific nod in at least 27 of 175 key clauses.
If you attended the May, 2016 expert meeting on food and nutrition issues in the New Urban Agenda at the UN’s New York headquarters, you will know that today’s draft has 27 more references to food than were in the draft tabled for discussion a mere six months ago.
That early draft expressed conventional wisdom in the city planning field — which holds that food is a rural, not an urban issue, and that urban issues end at the city line, and do blur into the regions surrounding them. Or vise versa, as if cities do not depend on surrounding rural areas for food and for a variety of other critical services, and do not need to be conceived in relation to these neighboring rural areas.
But the new wisdom has it that urban and rural are very close, on the policy map as well as the geography map.
Though cities occupy much less than 3 per cent of the world’s landmass, according to careful studies, they pack a big punch when it comes to impact, and food is the big ticket item that delivers that punch. The city impact on, and dependence on, foodsheds probably makes city-region territorial relationships the primary relationship cities have — a connection that really only dawned on city planners and policy analysts with the 2008 publication of Carolyn Steel’s Hungry City — one year after locavore was named word of the year by the Oxford Dictionary, and the local food movement was formally christened.
This understanding of urban territoriality leads to a new policy equation, a new sense of the relativity of the urban universe, which the New Urban Agenda is one of the first documents to identify. Food and territory took parallel paths to the same new urban agenda, Forster says.
New policy agendas are preceded by new policy conversations, and this document deserves to be seen as the icebreaker of a new conversation about cities, food and regions.
The only food-related idea missing from the New Urban Agenda document, in my opinion, is an understanding that food-production can equally fulfill environmental functions that are critical to urban well-being and sustainability. Over and above providing food for humans, food production creates a working landscape that can be designed to optimize co-products of food — services understood as environmental protection.
Food production has the capacity to store carbon in the soil, for example, which is central to food’s capacity to mitigate global warming, and to a city’s claim to help move the needle on sustainability by supporting farmers who farm sustainably. The food-producing landscape food can also manage stormwater, store and protect drinking-quality groundwater, reduce air pollution by capturing particulate, provide habitat for birds and other bio-diverse critters that have a hard time in cities, as well as providing natural scenery and outdoor activities that provide some respite from the intensity of Big Lights in the Big City stress levels.
This landscape function of food production rivals the importance of food eaten by people in nearby cities. Such ecosystem services need to be included in a new urban agenda.
I would argue that dependence on this landscape function of food-producing regions is what make it critical for cities to support the continued rurality of their countryside neighbors by going the extra mile, effortwise, to buy local food — much as New York City famously ensures its access to clean drinking water by paying 11 million dollars a year to people who farm upstream, as an incentive to farm ecologically and thereby sustain the purity of the city’s water supply.
That’s why farmers markets and city-initiated public procurement of local foods need to become cornerstones of a New Urban Agenda of cities and nearby regions working together on food security. They express the spirit of the new sharing economy much more dramatically than Internet-facilitated exchanges of car and apartment rentals that presently get classified as part of the sharing economy.
In this vision, cities and their surrounding regions are no longer ships passing in the night, with cities producing some specialties to export to world markets and nearby regions producing their specialties for export to world markets. They will begin to look at each other as best buddies in both sustainability and trade.
The concept that rural and urban were poles apart is now passé, Forster tells me during a lengthy interview, and the time has come for “mainstreaming linkages between urban and rural, especially around food.” (See especially items 49–51 and 70–1 of the New Urban Agenda.)
The Habitat 3 document also reveals the high watermark of implementation thinking around the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals, adopted in 2015, and may even qualify as an “operating manual” for efforts to link Goal 11 of the sustainable development goals to other sustainable development goals related to food and agriculture. This operating manual view of the New Urban Agenda, which raises its stature greatly, seems to be a shared view of Quito conference organizers.
Though this implementation function of the New Urban Agenda is hard to confirm from so few words, there are two reasons to hope that this conference might lead to practical results. One is the extraordinary amount of attention showered on people-related social and equity goals, as distinct from references to specific infrastructures. Secondly, references to urban governance (85–92), implementation (126–160) and follow-up (161–75) are remarkably detailed. There is even a strong hint (in clauses 153–4) in favor of people launching some form of food policy council, a tool of popular engagement which I believe is particularly helpful in forming action-oriented partnerships.
That might seem mundane, but from such nitty gritty acorns can mighty oaks grow.
To me, some of this language is reminiscent of what used to be known as “people-centered development” — a call in 1987 for development goals that focused on the people who would be agents of and beneficiaries of change, not just aspirational statements that gestured toward formal objectives linked to a particular cause of the day (end hunger, or cut poverty by half, for example).
People-centered development enjoyed its fifteen minutes in the sun, winning support from a number of UN conferences, including the Earth Summit of 1992 and Social Development Summit of 1995, before sinking in a sea of neo-liberalism which put change at the mercy of markets, not governments — and therefore spared all details of government policy.
It would seem that people centered policies are coming back into fashion.
In North America, where UN proclamations are not seen as precedent-setting or interfering in reality, Habitat 3’s New Urban Agenda isn’t likely to trump (pun intended) other matters of concern. But in Europe, where UN documents are actually treated as if they were decided on by national governments and international bodies (after all, they were), they will create space and conversations that food and city advocates can join.
There is a new urban agenda, and more importantly, a new nexus joining food, water, cities, equity and sustainability.
(Wayne Roberts is a policy analyst and practitioner of city-based food policy; check out his free newsletter at http://bit.ly/OpportunCity)
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