Know Your City: Linking community slum data to urban resilience

Kampala, Uganda, is home to 1.39 million slum dwellers. Not long ago, these communities were not even considered a part of the city. They did not appear on any map nor had any access to municipal authorities. This is what the Know Your City campaign allowed to change. The Know Your City campaign is a 

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“For the urban poor, nothing trumps location”

More than 200 million people in Africa live in slums, making it a major issue for cities growing at a rapid pace. With the Sustainable Development Goals – in particular SDG 1 and SDG 11 – national and local governments are looking for new ways to build inclusive and resilient cities for all, including the urban 

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From Agenda 21 to COP21: Addressing resilience in cities and informal settlements

By Omar Siddique, Senior Urban Specialist, Cities Alliance Chapter 7 on ‘human settlements’, which emerged from the first Rio Conference in 1992, received huge political push back from developing countries and environmentalists at the time of the negotiations over the text. Issues regarding cities and settlements were seen as part of the polluting, unsustainable “brown 

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Building Resilience in Informal Settlements

Building resilience in cities should enhance the quality of life for all residents. Yet resilience planning, like urban development, has previously excluded an entire subset of urban dwellers: those living in informal settlements. In reality, the residents of informal settlements should be central to strengthening local resilience; they represent a significant portion of the global 

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