URBAN GATEWAYFor The International Urban Development Community

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Building Cohesive Communities through Urban Gardening

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URBAN GATEWAY is an online community that helps cities and urban practitioners across the world unite to share knowledge and take action.

The Urban Gateway is the first web platform of its kind to leverage the energy and resources of the global urban development com-munity. It will allow UN-HABITAT and its external partners to network,exchange knowledge, discuss issues and share opportunities related to sustainable urbanization worldwide.

It responds to the needs of our partners - from governments and local authorities, to researchers, civil society organizations and the private sector - to establish a central hub of practical knowledge on building sustainable towns and cities.

Users of the Gateway are able to find and contact other members, form common interest groups, offer and apply for opportunities, share experiences and get the latest local and global news on urban issues in their language.

The Urban Gateway maintains the momentum, discussions and networks developed at the World Urban Forums, reinforces part-nerships and highlights the impact of World Urban Campaign.

We invite all partners to join the Gateway atwww.urbangateway.org

Welcome to the Urban Gateway

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source: jonijoni93.deviantart.com

In Brazil, women decide where to alight from the bus at night 6

Urban gardening builds cohesive communities 10

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Public Art makes for Brighter Cities

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Public Art makes for Brighter Cities

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Cities in the United States can now participate in the Public Art Challenge, a

new program to support innova-tive temporary public art projects by Bloomberg Philanthropies.

The program invites U.S. cities with 30,000 or more residents to submit proposals for creative and transformative projects. The chal-lenge aims to improve quality of life in cities and to reposition art at the core of society.

At least three cities will be grant-ed up to USD 1 million each over two years for art projects

that engage their communities, establish public-private partner-ships, and drive economic devel-opment. The challenge is part of Bloomberg Philanthropies’ goal to strengthen the arts in cities world-wide. Bloomberg Philanthropies also recently supported São Pau-lo Bienal – the world’s second largest art show – through fund-ing an app for the event, Bienal’s teacher education program, and exhibitions that will be accessible to the public in 10 to 15 Brazilian cities. These efforts help bring at-tention to the role of art in shap-ing public spaces for healthy, vibrant cities.

The need for public art funding

From improving traffic safety to

drawing attention to social jus-tice issues, public art plays an important role in advancing so-cial missions in cities. In 2011, TheCityFix covered a favela beautification project in Rio de Janeiro by Dutch artistic duo Haas&Hahn, which counteracted the negative imagery of infor-mal settlements. But artists like Haas&Hahn face great difficulty in securing funding. And in the United States, funding for the arts is on the decline. According to a 2013 report, United States government funding of the arts dropped by more than 30% from 1992 to 2013, adjusted for infla-tion. Bloomberg’s Public Art Chal-lenge comes at an important time to remind us of the importance of public art funding.

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A key feature of city landscapes and urban identity

Public arts are the core of civic life in cities worldwide. Art brings com-munity members together and makes it easy for people to share, connect and experiment. Candy Chang, an artist trained in urban planning, engaged her com-munity by initiating the Before I Die walls in her neigh-borhood. Anyone walking by these walls can pick up a piece of chalk and share their personal aspira-tions in public space by finish-ing the sentence: “Before I die I want to _______.” According to the artist’s website, the Before I Die walls have been created in over 30 languages and over 60 countries, including Kazakhstan, Portugal, Japan, Denmark, Iraq,

Argentina, and South Africa.

Art can shape a city’s identity, give residents ownership over their community, and even spur economic growth. Last year, tour-ists flooded Hong Kong to see a giant Rubber Duck installation floating on the West Kowloon waterfront, with over 38,000

visiting the exhibition in the five days after it was unveiled. A local travel agency even sold package tours to see them. The inflatable sculpture was created by Dutch artist Florentijn Hofman in 2007, and has appeared in dozens of cities worldwide attractingmillions of visitors.

The measure of a great city lies in its cultural life. Public art can unite a com-munity and be a magnet for tourism. More importantly, it helps educate and inspire our citizens to take ownership over their cities by creatively re-imaging public spaces. The Public Art Challenge hopes to reclaim the cultural element that is essential to our daily life and makes our cities more liv-able.

source: freshome.com

source: nextcity.org

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In Brazil, women decide where to alight from the bus at night

When deciding between modes of transport, travelers consider several variables, typically includ-ing convenience, cost, time, reliability, and comfort. Another consideration – which is particularly importantfor women – is perceived safety. No one prefers public transport if it requires walking

far from home on a dark, deserted road, even if there is a low crime rate in the area. Instinctually, this still feels unsafe.

Brasília, Brazil has adopted an important measure to improve women’s safety on public transport. As of June this year, women can request to get off buses anywhere along a route after 10pm – including ar-eas that are not traditional bus stops. Buses are required to meet this request and display information to make users aware of this right.

A study on urban mobility in Brasília sought to understand which characteristics can best predict a user’s transport behavior. The study found that user preferences result from a combination of how transit servic-es themselves are designed – including route locations, cost, and convenience – and the user’s profile – his or her gender, age, income, and reason for traveling. Brasília’s new law helps its transport system better serve users without requiring significant investments in new infrastructure.

source: thecityfix.com

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“The bus stop is usually far away when I’m coming home from classes, and when I get off the bus there is almost nobody on the streets. I have to be careful when I walk alone,” said 19-year-old university student Amanda Stheffany Ferreira, as reported by the Brasília State Department of Transportation (DFTRANS). Amanda is now one of many who can get off her bus closer to home.

This new measure reminds us of an issue that, while pressing, is often left unconsidered in designing and managing transport systems: gender. The United Nations Commission on the Status of Womenhas even created a working group focused on urban mobility. The commission found a male bias in the plan-ning and implementation of transport systems, either because women do not have equal representation in all areas, or because the men in charge are not considering the issue of gender in system configura-tion.

Every 12 seconds, a woman suffers sexual assault in Brazil, and sexual assault has grown 165% over the past five years. All options to reverse this alarming trend must be considered. The city government’s role is to provide mechanisms for preventing violence and defending citizens. Providing the option to get off buses closer to home will not solve the problem in its entirety. For example, harassment can even oc-cur inside public transport vehicles – which cities must also work to prevent. But giving women flexibility to arrive closer to their destination, or in a better lit, less empty area, is a step in the right direction.

source: sustainablecitiescollective.com

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Does Toshiba hold the key to the future of factory farming? The massive tech giant recently unveiled their incredible “clean” factory farm, which is capable of growing up to three million heads of let-tuce every year without using sunlight or soil. The factory farm, which is operating in a 21,000

square-foot electronic factory in Yokosuka, Japan, is to be used in the company’s new healthcare busi-ness and has the perfect germ-free environment for producing bagged lettuce, according to Toshiba and Science and Health.

Toshiba’s urban farm produces 3 million bags of lettuce without sunlight or soil

What’s inside the factory is the stuff of science fiction; a com-pletely isolated environment, with temperature and humidity control, monitored by lettuce inspectors who wear full body suits and face masks and use tablet devices to make notes about the quality and health of the plants. The plants themselves are constantly irradi-ated with artificial light to make them think it’s sunny, while being injected with vitamins and nutri-ents directly into their roots, re-moving the need for soil.

Science and Health reports that Toshiba’s goal is to produce the world’s highest-quality let-tuce that’s free of any bacteria, fungi or insects, and shipped in

a sealed bag to give it a longer shelf life than other lettuces. Each bag of lettuce is expected to cost about $1.60, and will re-quire absolutely no pesticides to produce – making it akin to or-ganic produce with an extremely long shelf life. Its new farm-

ing venture is a serious one for Toshiba, which aims to build simi-lar factories around the world in years to come, while selling the high tech equipment to others so they can fund similar factories to produce similar produce.

source: qz.com

source: popupcity.net

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Johannesburg will host the 2015 Eco-Mobility World Festival

South Africa’s largest city, Johannesburg, has agreed to host the second Eco-Mo-

bility World Festival next autumn and create a temporary car-free district to demonstrate the bene-fits of sustainable urban mobility.

During the month-long festival in October 2015, organised in partnership with ICLEI – Local Governments for Sustainability, Johannesburg will encourage residents in Sandton, one of the city’s busiest districts, to choose public transport, walking and cy-cling over private car use.

Councillor Parks Tau, Executive Mayor of Johannesburg, said: ‘We want to show residents and visitors that an eco-mobile future

is possible and that public trans-port, walking and cycling can be accessible, safe [and] attractive.’

Johannesburg is committing to providing alternative transport in and around Sandton during the festivities, and will also host forums and activities dedicated to sustainable mobility. The next steps for the city are to begin engaging residents, property owners, businesses and trans-port stakeholders to plan road closings and the festival’s pro-gramme.

The first Eco-Mobility Festival took place in Suwon (South Ko-rea) in September 2013, in co-operation with the City of Suwon and ICLEI - Local Governments

for Sustainability. The festival at-tracted over one million visitors from all over the world.

For more information visit ecomo-bilityfestival.org

source: www.bloomberg.com

source: www.juca.org.za

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Urban gardening builds cohesive communities

CNN recently described Cape Town,

South Africa as being in the midst of a “vegoultion,” with hundreds of new community gardens and urban farms popping up through-out the city in recent years. The city’s “Green Clusters” are help-ing to improve the local envi-ronment while providing impor-tantsocial benefits and helping local residents eat healthy. Cities worldwide are challenged to cre-ate welcoming environments that connect residents to their city and create a strong social fabric. Community gardens are one way to help residents take a creative

approach to making their cities more appealing, healthy, and sustainable.

Strengthening urban neighbor-hoods with community gardening

Community gardens are a pow-erful tool to turn decaying, un-appealing urban spaces into community assets. In the United States, community gardens have been found to increase neighbor-ing property values. New York City’s history of urban gardening demonstrated the ability to re-vitalize neighborhoods at a low cost. According to the EcoTipping Points Project, more than 800 gardens have helped engage the community, decrease crime, im-prove diets, and create cleaner

environments in the city since the 1970s. Many cities are turning to community gardens to address unused spaces. As of 2013, De-troit had about 80,000 vacant buildings. Residents, non-profits, and corporations are joining to-gether to repurpose vacant lots for community gardens, creating more livable areas while reducing blight.

In 2007, the government of Taipei, Taiwan encouraged citi-zens to transform unused public spaces into community farms as a way to relieve stress and grow food. In the city’s hillside suburbs, Songshan First Citizen’s Farm helps provide urbanites access to nature by allowing them to rent small farming plots. When

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speaking with Taiwan Today, the farm’s operator said he is often approached to sell the land for luxury apartments, but keeps the farm to preserve “an opportunity for families to bond and enjoy each other’s company.”

Through engaging marginalized residents, urban agriculture can

create more inclusive communi-ties. Astudy of five informal settle-ments in South Africa found that while urban farms only modestly contributed to food security and increased income, they had a wide range of other benefits for women that included reducing social alienation and family dis-integration. The koyaproject is a

global platform that helps build community gardens worldwide to increase social inclusion, educate children in self-sufficiency, nutri-tion and sustainability, and beau-tify neighborhoods, among other benefits. They focus on building gardens in community spaces like orphanages, schools, church-es and temples, and are using

crowdfunding to raise money for projects.

The vast potential for urban agri-culture

In addition to helping create social cohesion and an attach-ment to one’s city, urban agricul-ture is helping improve access to healthy food while providing valuable employment opportuni-ties worldwide. Urban farms can

help increase access to fruit and vegetables in developing coun-tries, where their consumption is between 20 and 50% below FHO/World Health Organization recommendations. In Ethiopia, the Urban Gardens Program for HIV-Affected Women and Chil-dren has benefited over 110,000 women, orphans, and vulnerable children by providing access to healthy food, new economic op-portunities, and stronger support

networks.

More and more city residents and NGOs are taking matters into their own hands to shape the cit-ies they want to live in. With com-munity gardens increasingly in-tertwined in urban environments, residents are creating cities to thrive

source: fivekennys.blogspot.com

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Why aren’t we adopting LED lighting fast enough?

Technology experts from The Climate Group will share exclusive insights

from a series of LED lighting con-sultations we’ve had with leading cities around the world, at the biggest city manager event in the US - Congress of Cities.

Lighting currently accounts for nearly 6% of global CO2 green-house gas emissions, so there is a clear opportunity for us to make a huge dent in emissions if we figure out how to make lighting more energy efficient.

One very compelling solution is

switching our lighting to low car-bon light-emitting diode (LED) lamps. Not only can LEDs cut CO2 emissions from lighting 50–70% (when combined with smart controls), they also reduce costs, enhance public safety, minimize light pollution and make public spaces friendlier at night.

This is surely evidence enough to present a striking opportunity for city managers around the world, so The Climate Group will be presenting our own LED research at Congress of Cities, a summit which attracts more city man-agers in the US than any other event.

Taking place in Austin, Texas, over four days of seminars and workshops that this year will

be based around the theme of The Future of Cities, Congress of Cities focuses on core topics including economic development, technology, sustainability, trans-portation and climate impacts.

The session we’ll be involved in is on November 20 at 10:30-11:15 AM, called ‘No Need to Wait: Accelerating Adoption of LED Street Lighting’. Speakers will be Niels Van Duinen Head of

Business and Professional Sup-port - Philips Lighting, Dr. Ben Ferrari Director Partnerships, The Climate Group and Dr. Peter Curley Technologist, The Climate Group.

Ben Ferrari comments: “Many of the biggest cities from the world’s major economies have already begun to adopt LED street light-ing: it is low carbon, cheaper and more efficient than traditional

source: www.hapihour.org

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lights.

“But that doesn’t mean every city has moved on this opportunity as quickly as we’d like. The Cli-mate Group is holding a series of consultations around the world this year to help work out what’s getting in the way of these cities adopting LEDs, so we can help remove the barriers. I’ll be shar-ing some of our findings with the

hundreds of city managers at Congress of Cities, which we are honoured to be part of.”

The Climate Group’s ongoing 2014 global consultation aims to help address the remaining key barriers to LED adoption, and this Congress of Cities session will provide our initial results, includ-ing technical, policy, financial issues and insights as well as the

broader socio-economic benefits that LED street lighting can pro-vide, with America’s top city man-agers.

Attendees will also have the op-portunity to attend one-to-one meetings (and follow ups) before and after this session to explore their specific issues in more de-tail.

source: www.hapihour.org

source: theorionsolar.wordpress.com

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The world’s “least livable city” could get a makeover

What if the world’s “least liveable city” had a chance to radically overhaul its image on a global stage before influential world leaders?

Rowan Callick reports for The Australian that Port Moresby, the capital and largest city in Papua New Guinea, will have that shot in 2018 when it hosts the next APEC (Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation) Summit.

Overrun with gangs and crime, Port Moresby receives abysmal rankings in the Economist’s annual Live-ability Index. This year, it’s third-lowest — above only war-torn Damascus and impoverished Dhaka. Put another way, Lagos, Karachi and Tripoli rank better than Port Moresby. In prior years, the city has ranked second-lowest and at the very bottom of the rankings.

On the plus side, the next four years will provide municipal and national leaders with a strong incentive to showcase improvement. As CityLab notes here, dense places such as Port Moresby are the preferred model for urbanization. Moreover, the city’s challenges will serve to highlight the importance of economic equality and inclusive development.

If Port Moresby isn’t ready in time, it can always take some cues from Beijing, this year’s host of the APEC Summit. Deutsche Welle reports that Beijing has encouraged locals to leave town, forced many factories to shutter and taken other steps to create the illusion of an orderly city for the gathering lead-ers.

source: tribeoffive.wordpress.com

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Study suggests that cities make you look old

Attention, lady urbanites: it may be time to give up on city living. This, just in from

the Daily Mail:

Women who live in the county-side look younger for longer, a study suggests.

City living makes the skin age 10 per cent faster than a rural exist-ence.

The story is based on a study of 200 city and countryside women with “similar lifestyles” who were exposed to “comparable amounts of ultraviolet radiation”. Apparent-

ly, the pollutants in city air dam-age proteins in the skin.

The piece goes on to tell the story of Elizabeth Hunt, 46, who, by living in “rural Kent”, has achieved an appearance that “belies her age”. She told the publication:

My husband and I grow our own vegetables and try not to use supermarkets. Fresh air and long country walks help, too, but city life was never for me.

So there you have it. Convenient as it may be to live so close to

your beloved cupcake shops and department stores (handbags! shoes!), your Sex in the City life-style is actually just making you look ugly and old.

There is a happy ending, of sorts. The study was funded by Proc-tor & Gamble, which produces and sells, among other things, anti-aging products. So, if you must wreck your skin by living in the city, at least you have easy access to the kind of over-priced face creams which can momen-tarily persuade you they will sort it out again. Huzzah.

source: commons.wikimedia.org

NB: Press Cutting ServiceThe Urban Gateway culls articles from daily press coverage from around the world. These

articles are posted on the Urban Gateway by way of keeping all users informed about matters of interest. The opinions expressed in these articles are those of the authors and in no way

reflects the opinion of UN-Habitat

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