Government and partners to host second South Africa Urban Conference
South Africa’s second national Urban Conference will be held on 30-31 October 2018 in Johannesburg.
The conference is convened by the South African Cities Network (SACN) in partnership with the national Departments of Cooperative Governance (DCOG), Human Settlements (DHS) and the National Treasury; the South African Local Government Association, SA Council for Planners (SACPLAN), ICLEI – Local Governments for Sustainability, and the Gauteng Provincial Government.
The Minister of Cooperative Governance and Traditional Affairs, Dr Zweli Mkhize will open the conference tomorrow on the 30th of October.
Urban Conference 2018 is themed “Activating an All-of-Society Approach to Implementing the Urban Agenda” – or #IUDF #allofsociety. The conference aims to assemble, engage and mobilise urban stakeholders around the implementation of our national Integrated Urban Development Framework (IUDF) which is a key local policy platform for advancing the National Development Plan, the Sustainable Development Goals (particularly Goal 11: Making cities inclusive, safe, resilient and sustainable) and the global New Urban Agenda (UN Habitat).
The inaugural conference brought together officials from South Africa’s major metros and a series of targeted stakeholders to build knowledge and awareness about the IUDF in order to inform their strategies and plans for urban development interventions. The 2018 conference will be extended to include various other urban actors who play a role in designing and implementing urban policies and interventions across our towns and cities.
In addition to sustaining the continuity of the conference as the major annual urban event convened by the “whole of government”, the objectives of the 2018 conference are to:
- Harvest: Drawing together the collective intelligence of various actors so as to map what is happening in the urban space. Identifying where there are opportunities for collaboration and co-producing effective urban responses.
- Engage: Working through what multi-stakeholder engagement looks like in practice. Thinking through creating and generating partnered responses.
- Mobilise: Talking, reflecting, planning together towards action in a coherent or coordinated way. How do we develop individual and collective plans to achieve our short and long term urban goals?
- Monitor: Benchmarking where we are now in order to measure progress over time. Determining what our qualitative and quantitative measures are for determining progress and success in implementing the urban agenda.
The outputs of the conference are to:
- Forge a social compact that will enable us to tackle the challenge of spatial integration through the IUDF,
- Discuss and agree on a roadmap that will mobilize the collaboration and commitment of IUDF partners to the implementation of the IUDF that will culminate in a National Urban Summit; and,
- Craft a National Urban Declaration that will guide the implementation of the IUDF.
The details of the conference are as follows:
Opening session: 30 October 2018
Venue: Turbine Hall, Newtown
Time: 09h00
Enquiries:
Musa Zondi
Cell: 072 800 6449
