Urban Livelihoods: Reviewing the Evidence in Support of the New Urban Agenda

The New Urban Agenda, the 20-year strategy on sustainable urbanization, was formally adopted by over 160 countries at the United Nations Conference on Housing and Sustainable Urban Development (Habitat III) in October 2016. The final document explicitly recognizes “the contribution of the working poor in the informal economy”. It advocates “people-centred” urban governance that empowers and includes stakeholders. This marks a significant global shift in thinking. Civil society actors, notably organisations of informal workers, have played an important role in securing this commitment.
Attention now turns to national and city-level implementation. This paper is a contribution to bolster these efforts. Much of the material draws from the work of the global-research-action-policy network WIEGO (Women in Informal Employment: Globalizing and Organizing).

This paper was originally published as Chen, Roever and Skinner. 2016. “Urban livelihoods: reviewing the evidence in support of the New Urban Agenda?” Environment and Urbanization. Brief 34. The Brief was funded by UK aid from DFID.