City-Wide Public Space Strategies: a Compendium of Inspiring Practices offers summaries and assessments of 26 such strategies from different cities in all regions of the world. It also proposes a new set of typologies of strategies and a framework with which strategies can be evaluated. This compendium is complemented…

During the Habitat III conference celebrated in Quito, Adrian Michael Peters, Chief Strategy Officer of eThekwini Municipality, together with Maria Regina Rau and Puvendra Akkiah, technical chairs of the UCLG Committee on Urban Strategic Planning and Nadime Yaver director for the Office of Public Space Ombudsman (_Defe…

A Global Perspective on Our Common Urban Future This article is a report on the work of our group, the Centre for the Future of Places at KTH Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm, and its role as an outgrowth of the Future of Places initiative – a partnership of UN-Habitat, the Ax:son Johnson Foundation, an…

Born out of an anti-car protest in 1974, the Colombian capital closes many roads to cars every Sunday, leaving them free for bikes, skates and pedestrians. Once a week the citizens of Bogotá take back the streets of their city. Every Sunday, between 7am and 2pm, many of the biggest roads are shut to cars and left…

Neighbourhoods where people can pop out to a shop, cycle to their doctor or walk children to school are places that many people have enjoyed in the past. But, given planning and urban design practices since the proliferation of the car, being able to do this cannot be taken for granted today. As local authorities look…

Green Riyadh is one of Riyadh’s four mega projects launched by the Custodian of the Two Holy Mosques, King Salman Bin Abdulaziz, on 19 March 2019. The project will be a milestone that contributes to fulfilling a key goal of Vision 2030 to promote Riyadh’s position among the world’s top 100 most livable cities. 7.5 mill…