Keynote lecture 3: Urban Pathways to SDG Success

• Dr. Edgar Pieterse, Director of the African Centre for Cities and Professor at the University of Cape Town

The success or failure of the 2030 Agenda will depend on the ability of governments and supra-national regions to recognise that sustainable urbanism lives at the intersection of most SDGs. The talk will substantiate this claim by analysing the institutional and spatial inter-dependencies between the SDGs and make a case for accelerating city-level innovation systems that can serve as living laboratories to figure out new modalities of infrastructure provision (at the nexus of circular, social and platform economic principles), land-use, citizen empowerment and intelligent regulation. Examples will be drawn from regions with the most pressing urbanisation pressures because we need international cooperation and solidarity where the challenges are most acute, and solutions most urgent.

Discussants:

• Dr. Aromar Revi, Director for the Indian Institute for Human Settlements (IIHS) and Co-Chair of the UN Sustainable Development Solutions Network (SDSN)
• Ms. Astrid Haas, Policy Director, International Growth Centre
• Ms. Mrudhula Koshy, PhD Candidate, Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU)