Five cities won the Shanghai Award, providing excellent examples for promoting a sustainable future for cities
October 31st is World Cities Day. On the same day, at the 2024 World Cities Day global home event held in Alexandria, Egypt, five cities: Agadir, Morocco, Trivandrum, India, Doha, Qatar, Istapalapa, Mexico, and Melbourne, Australia, won the Global Sustainable Cities Award (Shanghai Award) in recognition of their outstanding achievements in urban development.
As hubs of commerce, culture, science and technology, productivity, and social development, cities represent human progress and civilization. Currently, more than 50% of the world's population already lives in cities. According to UN-Habitat forecasts, by 2030, nearly 60% of the world's population and about 5 billion people will live in urban areas. Rapid urbanization on a global scale has brought unprecedented wealth of material and spiritual wealth to mankind, but it has also led to a series of new development problems and challenges: global cities only account for 3% of the earth's land area, but consume 60%-80% of energy, resulting in 75% of carbon emissions; rapid urbanization has also led to population expansion, traffic congestion, housing shortage, environmental pollution, resource shortage, gap between rich and poor, and cultural conflicts. Sustainable urban development has become one of the urgent challenges facing mankind in the 21st century.
World Cities Day is the first international day established at the initiative of China and adopted by a resolution of the United Nations General Assembly. It provides an important platform for exploring cooperation in addressing various urban issues and promoting the implementation of the United Nations 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development. World Cities Day began at the 2010 Shanghai World Expo. It is an important spiritual inheritance of the concept of "Better City, Better Life" and provides a broad space for exchanges among countries to promote common development and safeguard the future of mankind. As this concept is deeply rooted in the hearts of the people, it is becoming a global consensus that development cannot be at the expense of people's interests and the natural environment.
World Cities Day provides valuable public goods to promote the sustainable development of cities around the world. The important knowledge product of World Cities Day,"Shanghai Handbook: A Guide to Sustainable Urban Development in the 21st Century", takes "harmonious cities" as the main line and creates a sustainable development model for global cities by selecting excellent solutions for urban development around the world. On the basis of the annual revision of the Shanghai Handbook, UN-Habitat and the Shanghai City People's Government work together and continue to innovate to create an international award-the Global Sustainable Cities Award (Shanghai Award). Outstanding cities that have made outstanding progress in sustainable development promote the implementation of the United Nations 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development and promote the global localization of the New Urban Agenda. AnnaClaudia Rossbach, Executive Director of UN-Habitat, believes that through the awarding of the Shanghai Award, more cities can pay attention to the importance of sustainable development and jointly shape a global sustainable development future.
At the same time, as China, India and other countries rapidly enter the era of urbanization, urbanization in developing countries has become an important link in the global urbanization development process. With the help of the exchange and cooperation platform of World Cities Day, developing countries lacking urbanization experience can discuss in depth with developed countries the main challenges in the process of rapid urban development and learn fromXiAdvanced experience, and developed countries can also take this as an opportunity to jointly practice solutions with developing countries to promote the sustainable development of global cities and even all mankind.
From promoting the concept of "people-oriented" urbanization into the hearts of the people, to showing outstanding cases of global urbanization, from publishing urban sustainable development guidelines, to promoting in-depth discussions on urbanization experiences and lessons learned among countries, World Cities Day promotes sustainable development of global cities. It provides an important reference and contributes to building an inclusive, safe, resilient and sustainable world.
At present, the world economy is struggling to recover, and interdependence among countries is deepening. Market factors such as capital and talents are breaking through existing regional constraints and flowing around the world with cities as nodes. At the same time, the international community is also facing challenges such as the financial crisis, climate change and cultural conflicts. Under such a background, no city can survive alone. We can only jointly respond to the current challenges faced by urbanization in a spirit of open cooperation, fully share our respective urbanization experiences and lessons, and bring excellent sustainable development solutions to the world. Only then can the future of sustainable development be realized step by step.
