IN DEPTH: WORLD URBAN FORUM
FAQs
CBC News Online | June 19, 2006
From June 19 to 23, 2006, Vancouver is hosting the World Urban Forum, where thousands of people with an interest in how to plan and run the world's cities will gather to exchange ideas.
CBC.ca has special coverage of the forum in a section called cityspace.
Here are some frequently asked questions about the World Urban Forum:
Who runs the World Urban Forum?
The forum is held by the United Nations Human Settlement Programme, also called UN-HABITAT, headquartered in Nairobi, Kenya.
The WUF in Vancouver is the third such forum held by the UN agency. The first was held in Nairobi in 2002 and the second in Barcelona, Spain in 2004.
The UN held its first conference on human settlements, called Habitat, in Vancouver in 1976. UN-HABITAT was formed two year later, but didn't hold its second conference on cities, Habitat II, until 1996 in Istanbul, Turkey.
Who is participating?
The UN says the forum will attract more than 6,000 participants from 150 nations, including city planners, engineers, academics, members of government agencies at all levels, and grassroots and community organizations.
Forum organizers say it will provide an opportunity for people from the world's best cities (including Vancouver, consistently ranking high in quality-of-life surveys) and those from the worst slums to exchange ideas.
Prime Minister Stephen Harper and UN Secretary General Kofi Annan are among the dignitaries opening the conference.
What will they talk about?
The forum includes five days of networking and training events, debates and smaller roundtable sessions. The overall theme of the conference is sustainable cities. Scheduled topics include:
- The widening gap between developed and developing nations.
- Clean air and water.
- Safety.
- Housing.
- Poverty.
- Energy.
- Alternative transportation.
The forum will also include meetings of community leaders from areas hit by the 2004 tsunami — India, Indonesia, Sri Lanka and Thailand — to discuss the methods they used to rebuild when government and aid agencies were overwhelmed.
Some of the topics arose from Habitat JAM, a unique four-day event held in December 2005, in which 39,000 people in 194 countries expressed their concerns about urban life through computers.
The participants included thousands from the slums of Delhi, India and Kibera, Kenya, and some people from remote areas who had never seen a computer.
More than 600 ideas for WUF3 came out of Habitat JAM. The UN is also producing a movie based on the event.
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