Our event “New Towns; laboratories for implementation of the New Urban Agenda” has been selected as part of the official program of the Habitat III conference.
As our partner, member, colleague or friend, we invite you to join our event in Quito! Many competences and voices will help to formulate ideas and proposals to make the implementation of the New Urban Agenda a success.
This event, organized in partnership with Land and Housing Research Institite (LHI) and UN Habitat, wants to create the opportunity for New Towns to share knowledge and experiences to advance innovation in new cities and towns around the globe.
Thursday, 20th of October
9:30 - 10:30 a.m. Room R12
– 09:30 - 09:32 Introduction by moderator Bert Smolders, INTI Board member, Arcadis, UN Habitat, Shelter
– 9:32 - 09:35 Welcoming Speech of Kang Hoin, Minister of Land, Infrastructure and Transport, Korea
– 9.35 - 9.50 "The New Town perspective on the New Urban Agenda”, including film with voices of partners, Michelle Provoost, INTI Executive Director
– 9.50 - 9.57 “Implementation of the NUA in New Towns in developing countries”, Jeongjoong Yoon, Land & Housing Institute, Korea
– 9.57-10.01 "Toward a Platform to Support Sustainable New Town Development", UN-Habitat
– 10.01 - 10.15 Panel discussion with:
Markus Appenzeller (urban planner and partner at MLA+),
Christine Auclair (Project Leader WUC),
Germanico Pinto, Ecuador (president of Ciudad Smart)
Ric Stephens (president of ISOCARP)
– 10.15-10.30 discussion with the participants
The event “New Towns; laboratories for implementation of the New Urban Agenda” is an action-oriented initiative that aims to produce realistic and concrete future projects by creating partnerships between New Towns.
What are the most important challenges and opportunities on the agenda of New Towns? How can questions of livability, demography, participation, work, accessibility and mobility be transformed into guidelines for the design of new towns?
By creating and extending the platform in synergy with other international urban professional networks and organizations and by linking the questions raised by those cities, INTI aims to get stronger answers for the implementation of the new urban agenda.
The ultimate goal of this event is to connect professionals and representatives from New Towns worldwide and nourish a solid process of mutual learning. With the network and platform that INTI creates, examples of implementation will become accessible for similar cities, universities and design professionals.
In 1964 the ‘United Nations Symposium on the planning and development of new towns’ took place in Moscow. At that moment a rapid urbanization took place all around the world and international experts questioned and discussed the quality of the new necessary urban developments. The new towns from this post war period still exist and define a great part of the urbanized world: all dating from the same period, they now face questions posed by an ageing population, mobility, livability. Nowadays the level of urbanization is expected to rise further, mainly in the fast-growing global south. New cities are being planned and built under different circumstances than in the fifties and sixties but with the same goal: to house, shelter and provide services for the people. More than 50 years after the UN symposium in Moscow, the International New Town Institute (INTI) wants to put the development of these two generations of new towns on the New Urban Agenda and discuss the challenges and opportunities of the existing and future new towns.
The side event in Quito has a specific focus on new towns: some are older and in the midst of transforming and reinventing themselves, others are presently on the drawing boards. New Towns are a special category of cities, with their own characteristics and specificities, however they share the same DNA: they are built according to a master plan, from scratch on a location where previously there was no city, and they have a high degree of political autonomy. New Towns have existed ever since humanity started organizing itself in settlements. Planned communities have always been the ultimate challenge for politicians and designers: what is the ideal city? What is the city of tomorrow?
The event was preceded by the first International New Town Day held on June 30 in Almere, the Netherlands, where the New Towns Perspective on the New Urban Agenda was presented. It selected the priorities within the Agenda for New Town planning and suggested alternative strategies to create more inclusive and livable cities.