REPORT OF THE 4TH UCLG WORLD CONGRESS
Launch of GOLD III Following the round table, Salvador Esteve presented the GOLD III report ‘Basic Services for All in an Urbanizing World’. The panellists were joined by GOLD Steering Committee member, Jean Marie Tétart, former Secretary General of the United Towns Organization (1989-1997) and Mayor of Houdan. Mr. Tétart praised the contribution of the report to international debates. He described the progress in basic service provision as highlighted in the report, and discussed current and future challenges, particularly the quest for sustainable financing.
Margareta Wahlström, Special Representative of the UN Secretary-General for Disaster Risk Reduction, contributed a risk perspective on basic services. She explained how economic growth generates new risks in service provision and infrastructure, and called for risksensitive urban planning. Making sure that hospitals and schools are resilient is the first step. She also highlighted the fact that, due to rapid urbanization, informal, unsafe settlements are no longer only inhabited by those living in extreme poverty. Inadequate housing is becoming a problem for more and more social groups. She described the GOLD III report as “an
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rabat 2013 - the world summit in numbers | www.uclg.org
invaluable resource for all of us” for dealing with issues of planning, participation and decentralization. Joaquim Oliveira Martins of the OECD argued that we should stop looking at economic development, equity and environmental sustainability as trade-offs. Rather, we should examine the relationship and connections between them. This perspective generates useful concepts such as ‘inclusive development’ and ‘green growth’. For such an integrated vision of wellbeing, national data is not very useful. We need to be able to measure at the right scale. He pointed out that even local administrative borders can be misleading, as ‘functional cities’ often cross them. The challenge is to build adequate governance frameworks. He pointed out that the OECD has only just launched its first guidelines for sub-national governance i.e. progress is being made on localizing wellbeing indicators, but from a low base. Jenaro Garcia Martin, CEO of Gowex, argued that internet services should be understood as services that are crucial to wellbeing. He described broadband as ‘the water of the 21st century’.