![Sample our Built Environment journals, sign in here to start your access, Latest two full volumes FREE to you for 14 days]({"type":"image" , "src" : "/sda/5926/TOC-Subject-Sample-2021-Built-Environment.jpg"})
ABSTRACT
This article traces the underexplored history of global governance toward housing policy, from its origins in the postwar era United Nations through the Habitat III conference at Istanbul in 2016. In the process this article illustrates the unique characteristics of Global Urban Governance (GUG), analyzing how it emerged to meet global housing challenges. This is a vibrant history in which international organizations try to influence local politics, and vice versa, with cities as significant players in global governance. As urban planning increasingly takes place in a global context, with municipalities forging a growing web of political linkages, this article explores this phenomenon from its roots in the post war era. This history shows a contradictory yet complicated housing discourse at the global level, reframing local housing challenges as a singularly global issue. By 2016 GUG had expanded significantly through a variety of modalities linking planners and their publics, growing in complexity, contentiousness and debate. This article makes the case that GUG was a conduit for key city building principles from modernist ‘international styles’ to the new urbanism.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Notes
1 Barnett and Finnemore, Rules for the World; and Keohane, After Hegemony.
2 Arajärvi, “Including Cities in the 2030 Agenda,” 18.
3 Tavares, Paradiplomacy, 15.
4 Ibid.
5 Curtis, Global Cities and Global Order, 170; Curtis, “Global Cities and the Transformation”; Curtis ed., The Power of Cities; and Magnusson, “Social Movements and the Global City.”
6 Blank, “Localism in the New Global Legal Order,” 263.
7 Abrams, Man’s Struggle For Shelter in an Urbanizing World, 11.
8 Angel, Housing Policy Matters, 58.
9 Mumford, The CIAM Discourse on Urbanism, 3.
10 Holston, The Modernist City, 32.
11 Curtis, “The Meaning of Global Cities,” 26.
12 Alter and Meunier, “Nested and Overlapping Regimes.”
13 Raustiala and Victor, “The Regime Complex for Plant Genetic Resources,” 279.
14 Ibid.
15 Ostrom, “A Polycentric Approach for Coping with Climate Change,” 6.
16 Keohane and Victor, “The Regime Complex for Climate Change,” 23.
17 Friedmann and Wolff, “World City Formation”; Sassen, The Global City; Castells, The Rise of the Network Society; Taylor, World City Network; and Sassen, “A Focus on Cities Takes.”
18 Fidler, “Architecture Amidst Anarchy,” 3.
19 Taylor et al., “Measuring the World City Network.”
20 Fidler, “Architecture Amidst Anarchy,” 2.
21 United Nations Human Settlements Programme, The Global Campaign on Urban Governance, 13.
22 Aust and Plessis, “Introduction,” 9.
23 Riegner, “International Institutions and the City,” 43.
24 Ibid., 45.
25 Ibid., 46.
26 Haas, “Do Regimes Matter?”
27 Crane and Paxton, “The Worldwide Housing Problem.”
28 Ibid., 16.
29 Abrams, Man’s Struggle For Shelter in an Urbanizing World, 90.
30 Weissmann, “The Urban Crisis in the World,” 71.
31 Ibid., 67.
32 Ibid., 69. Emphasis mine.
33 United Nations, “Housing and Town and Country Planning,” 343.
34 United Nations, Training for Town and Country Planning, 4.
35 Garner-Medwin, “The UN and Resettlement in the Far East,” 295.
36 United Nations, Report of the Ad Hoc Groups, 12–13.
37 Weissmann, “The Urban Crisis in the World,” 81; Weissmann, “The Urban Crisis,” 164.
38 Crane and Paxton, “The Worldwide Housing Problem,” 39; Garner-Medwin, “The UN and Resettlement in the Far East,” 294.
39 Garner-Medwin, “The UN and Resettlement in the Far East,” 295.
40 Ammon, Bulldozer, 182.
41 Garner-Medwin, “The UN and Resettlement in the Far East,” 294.
42 Ibid., 286.
43 United Nations, Urban Land, 18.
44 Abrams, Man’s Struggle For Shelter in an Urbanizing World, 91.
45 Ibid., 91.
46 Ibid., 95; Mumford, Designing the Modern City, 321.
47 Mumford, Designing the Modern City, 322; Land, The Experimental Housing Project (PREVI).
48 McGuirk, Radical Cities, 71.
49 Abrams, Man’s Struggle For Shelter in an Urbanizing World, 244.
50 International Housing Coalition, Multilateral and Bilateral Funding of Housing, 3.
51 Gardner-Medwin, “United Nations Resettlement in the Far East,” 285.
52 Mumford, The CIAM Discourse on Urbanism, 90.
53 Sert, “The First Urban Design Conference,” 5.
54 Gardner-Medwin, “The UN and Resettlement in the Far East,” 289.
55 Brown, “What Can Habitat III Learn From Habitat I.”
56 United Nations Human Settlements Programme, The Vancouver Declaration on Human Settlements, 25.
57 Ibid., 119.
58 Ibid., 30.
59 Ibid., 11.
60 Ibid., 13.
61 Ibid., 3.
62 Ibid., 16.
63 Ibid, 3.
64 Ibid., 18.
65 Fidler, “Architecture Amidst Anarchy,” 6.
66 United Nations Human Settlements Programme, The Habitat Agenda Goals and Principles, 45.
67 Ibid., 18.
68 United Nations Human Settlements Programme, Global Report on Human Settlements 2003, 151.
69 United Nations Human Settlements Programme, World Cities Report 2016, 203.
70 United National Programme on Human Settlements, Global Housing Strategy Framework Document, 6.
71 Ibid., 8.
72 UN Development Programme, “Sustainable Development Goal 11.”
73 Aust and Du Plessis, “Introduction,” 5.
74 Ibid., 3.
75 United Nations General Assembly, Policy Paper 1, 17.
76 United Nations General Assembly, Policy Paper 10, 8.
77 United Nations Human Settlements Programme, Habitat III Issue Papers, 2.
78 United Nations, Habitat III, New Urban Agenda, 2.
79 Ibid., 6.
80 Ibid., 18.
81 Ibid., 13.
82 Scruggs, “Alternative Forums to Offer Urban Visions Outside of Habitat III.”
83 Arajärvi, “Including Cities in the 2030 Agenda,” 30.
84 United Nations, Habitat III, New Urban Agenda, 17.
85 Ibid.
86 Curtis, Global Cities and Global Order, 172.
87 Taveras, Paradiplomacy, 15.
88 López, “Framing Urban Movements,” 29.
89 Sheela Patel (Society for the Promotion of Area Resource Centers, Shack/Slum Dwellers International), in discussion with the author, May 2012.
90 Patel, SPARC and its Work, 2.
91 Ibid., 9.
92 Mitlin, “A Fund to Secure Land For Shelter.”
93 In correspondence with the author, June 2010. Name withheld at the request of the interviewee.
94 López, “Framing Urban Movements,” 29, 34.
95 Hsing, The Great Urban Transformation, 15.
96 Talen, Neighborhood; and Talen ed., Retrofitting Sprawl.
97 United Nations Human Settlements Programme, State of the World’s Cities 2012/2013, 130. Emphasis mine.
98 United Nations Human Settlements Programme, State of the World’s Cities 2012/2013, part three.
99 Patel and Arputham, “Plans for Dharavi.”
100 Bertaud, “Converting Land Into Affordable Housing Floor Space.”
101 Patel, “Life Between Buildings.”
102 Riegner, “International Institutions and the City,” 38.
103 Buckley and Kalarickal, Thirty Years of World Bank Shelter Lending, 39; and The World Bank, World Development Report 2009, 49.
104 United Nations General Assembly, Right to the City and Cities for All, 35.
105 United Nations Human Settlements Programme, State of the World’s Cities 2012/2013, 127.
106 United Nations Human Settlements Programme, Habitat III Issue Papers: Informal Settlements, 3.
107 United Nations Human Settlements Programme, Habitat III Issue Papers: Housing, 2.
Additional information
Notes on contributors
Joshua K. Leon
Joshua K. Leon is Chair of Political Science and International Studies at Iona College. He has written for venues including Third World Quarterly, City, Peace Review, Cities, and Cambridge Review of International Affairs. His book is called The Rise of Global Health: The Evolution of Effective Collective Action.