Dear WUC Research and Academia Partner Constituency Group (RAPCG) members:
We hope everything is going well at your end. This time we have 4 news items to share with you:
1 The deadline for Urban Thinkers Campus 8.0 proposals is coming soon: the 26th of this month. Proposals for events during 2023 may be in-person, virtual or hybrid, and must relate to The City We Need Now https://www.worldurbancampaign.org/tcwn. Proposers must be partners of WUC. Full information and application portal are available here: https://www.worldurbancampaign.org/utc8
2 Some weeks ago, the WUC staff asked partners to complete a survey of interest in the idea of a City Changers Academy. Building on the success of the Urban Thinkers Campuses, the idea of the Academy is to “offer a set of peer-learning sessions in flexible modules for city and community actors to support urban planning and design, urban institutions, legal frameworks and urban economic processes.” Response to the survey was thin and so the WUC steering committee is considering dropping the idea. We believe the City Changers Academy has the potential to be an important tool for universities to contribute to capacity building for sustainable urbanization and so we hope to know if you and your institutions would like to engage this initiative. If there is interest, please let us know and share any ideas for how the Academy might be structured.
3 The once-in-four-years meeting of the Habitat Assembly will take place in Nairobi 5-9 June. This is the convening of member states’ representatives to UN-Habitat intended to review UNH’s activities and approve the agency’s work plan for the future. WUC partners are eligible to attend – instructions for how to register will be shared by the WUC secretariat in the next weeks. There is interest in mounting side events at the Habitat Assembly during which WUC partners will share progress and ideas concerning housing, resilience and urban crises. Please consider volunteering to contribute to these sessions and be alert for the Call that will come from the secretariat. https://unhabitat.org/governance/un-habitat-assembly
4 Then, in July, the United Nations will convene the annual High-level Political Forum on Implementation of the SDGs at UN headquarters in New York, 5-15 July. https://hlpf.un.org/ This year’s HLPF will focus on SDGs 6, 7, 9, 11 and 17. The WUC steering committee is beginning to think about what WUC might do to share best practices from our partners during the HLPF; your ideas would be welcome, especially if you will be able to participate in New York. Again, please be on the lookout for further news.
Please don’t hesitate to let us know how the RAPCG might best serve you going forward.
Bruce Stiftel, Global Planning Education Association Network (GPEAN)
Margarita Greene, CEDEUS, Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile
Co-chairs, WUC Research and Academia Partner Constituency Group
For more information you can contact the AESOP representative in GPEAN via
