The campaign of cities and regions supporting stand-alone urban goal

UCLG has launched a new website to promote the local and regional government campaign for a Stand-Alone Goal on Sustainable urbanization. The initiative, supported by cities like Bilbao, Bordeaux, Kazan, Istanbul, Quito and Rabat, to mention a few, comes as part of the awareness raising campaign in the run-up to the event at the ECOSOC Chamber to take place at the UN in New York on 13 December. The Session “Sustainable Cities; Key to Sustainability and Development” will be the occasion to advocate for a greater role for local governance and urbanization in the SDGs.

Through this new website www.urbansdg.uclg.org UCLG will provide key information and resources on the campaign and the advocacy strategy of local and regional authorities for a Sustainable Development Goal that acknowledges the rapid urbanization process underway in many regions of the world. This process is an important transformative phenomenon that will reshape the world as we know it, with impact going beyond the lives of city-dwellers and consequences on a global scale. Nevertheless, cities have the potential to offer solutions to this global challenge.

This campaign follows the initiative of the Rabat World Congress Declaration in calling for a single and universal development agenda that includes this stand-alone goal. On this same occasion, the UCLG World Council decided to publicly support the initiative of the UN Sustainable Development Solutions Network’s entitled, “Why the world needs an urban sustainable development goal”. The proposal, which has been developed with the active participation of UCLG, is further supported by key partners of the Global Taskforce of Local and Regional Governments, such as UN Habitat, Cities Alliance and ICLEI.

The website is structured around three highlighted sections: “Why Join?”, “Join Now”, "Support" and “Signatories”, each containing information about the support gathered for this initiative from local and regional governments and their associations.

UCLG calls upon its members to contribute to this initiative and visit the website: www.urbansdg.uclg.org.

Join the campaign #urbanSDG!