Sustaining Peace through Urban Safety: Charting Key Lessons for the UN High-Level Forum

Finding better responses to a changing landscape of conflict and violence is becoming an increasing priority in international security, development, and peacebuilding circles. Yet architects, urban planners, and city authorities are only slowly starting to be part of this conversation. Not least, this is because peacebuilding efforts have traditionally been associated with inter-state or civil wars; and this despite a growing convergence among experts that most violent conflicts no longer fit these categories. While wars in Syria, Iraq or Yemen make the headlines, the great majority of violent deaths occur in urban 'non-conflict' settings, with Central America, Southern Africa, the Caribbean, and South America being the worst-affected regions. There, many city policies have emphasized repressive approaches where state authorities crush crime through 'law-and-order' initiatives or a 'war on drugs'. These approaches, however, have largely proven to be ineffective in terms of violence and crime reduction, and in sustaining peace. This networking event builds on over three years of work on the confluence of urban safety and peacebuilding practice in contribution to the High-Level Forum on Sustaining Peace convened by the President of the UN General Assembly in April 2018. The event also launches the second cycle of exchanges of the Technical Working Group on the Confluence of Urban Safety and Peacebuilding Practice convened by the Geneva Peacebuilding Platform – in view of supporting the implementation of the Secretary General's Report on Conflict Prevention and the UN's sustaining peace agenda. Both agendas are critical components of UN reform, and of the implementation of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and New Urban Agenda (NUA).