Addressing inclusionary housing in SDG 11:Land management strategies to supply affordable housing at scale

This training event is designed to meet the needs of policy makers, urban practitioners and decision makers who are concerned with promoting the residential social inclusion of the poor in cities in the developing world.

The training focuses on localization of the SDG11, with a particular focus on target 11.1, which aims at providing safe and affordable housing for all and upgrading slums.

The training is consistent with the transformative commitments of the New Urban Agenda (NUA) and provides the participants with an analytical framework to understand housing and informal urbanization and the emergence of slums and informal settlements. Subsequently, the training offers a set of practical tools drawn from real case studies to increase the supply of serviced land at scale, thus helping cities towards sustainable planning of urbanization patterns. The knowledge and skills developed through the training event will therefore strengthen the capacity of cities to localize the SDG11.1 and implement the NUA within their jurisdictions.

Why is the supply of serviced land at scale so relevant for the implementation NUA and the realization of the SDG11.1? If this issue is not adequately resolved, it is likely that the realization of the SDG11 and the NUA will be seriously compromised. The training program will provide unequivocal evidences that inequalities and social exclusion, manifested in the form of slums and informal settlements where large parts of the population live in adequate housing, are closely associated with the way land is held, managed, sold and allocated. Cities and local governments have shown capacity to absorb rapid urban growth. The consequence is inadequate housing built on unsuitable land developments (often in areas of environmental risk), leading to urban sprawl and creating costly urbanization and spatial patterns. For example, in the less developed countries, cities expanded in area by a factor of 3.5 between 1990 and 2015, while 60% of overall housing in the areas of cities built were unplanned or informally developed, outside the reach of formal regulations (Atlas of Urban Expansion, 2016).