Topic: Sustainable cities

Safe and sustainable mobility: on the road to the SDGs

Every year 1.35 million people are killed in the world’s roads. 50 million more are injured.

Road crashes are the leading cause of death for children and young people (5-29 years) and developing countries bear the greatest burden. But it’s not just personal safety – the economic costs keep people in poverty and road quality is linked to many areas of sustainable development.

Safe and sustainable public transport helps provide access to trade, jobs, markets, education, health care and other services that contribute to economic growth and quality of life. It can empower women, persons with disabilities and other vulnerable groups.

Road safety should be an integral element of land use, street design, fighting climate change, transport system planning and governance, especially for vulnerable road users and in urban areas.

Solutions exist, we can prevent millions of tragedies on the road worldwide.

The lecture was hosted by the the IPAG Business School and the UN Road Safety Fund.

Urban at heart of Sustainable Development Goals

Making cities fair

Starting with questions about what an increasingly urban world implies for fairness at the national or global scale in the 21st century, the geographical reference points for this investigation of “fair cities” are both northern and southern urban places. This lecture traces the divergent and contradictory intellectual and practice based traditions that the notion of fairness in the city implies, including the work on urban equity (rights, opportunity, access, affordability); justice (electoral; procedural, distributional, enforcement and); redistribution (urban welfare and post conflict); the public good and the good city.

The central point is to demonstrate that ideas and practices about fairness in the city vary over time and space and that while there is appropriate concern about rising exclusion and the withdrawal of social protection in some centres, typically older more affluent cities, from new urban nodes, largely in the global south, there are counter tendencies and new innovations that support the utopian aspiration that cities will provide a better future for the millions of new residents that will call them home over the decades to come.