Representatives from 193 countries met between 17 and 20 October  this year  for the Habitat III Conference at Ecuador's charming capital, Quito, to sign the Quito Declaration, adopting the United Nations' New Urban Agenda. Although legally not binding, the agenda provides a roadmap on how to turn our urban future in a more positive direction to create more jobs, provide cheaper housing, cleaner energy, better transportation and greater social equity, indeed  issues that are of crucial importance to a fast urbanising country like India.

The previous Habitat Conference was held in Istanbul in 1996. Between then and now, the number of people living in urban areas worldwide has increased from 45 per cent to 55 per cent. It is projected that by 2030, two-thirds of the global population and 40 per cent of India's population will be urban. Cities today generate 80 per cent of global GDP, but also 70 per cent of greenhouse gas emissions. Every sixth urban resident lives in a slum. Land conflicts are erupting with the haphazard spread of the urban footprint over its rural periphery and urban social divides are widening.

The New Urban Agenda attempts to address the opportunities and challenges associated with the global urban turn, explained Joan Clos, Executive Director of UN-Habitat. It also takes into account recommendations of the Paris Declaration on Climate Change, World Urban Forum 2014, and of course Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and targets, including SDG 11 of making cities and human settlements inclusive, safe, resilient and sustainable.

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The number  of urban planners in India is microscopic. Britain has 38 planners per 100,000 people. In India, the figure is just 0.23. There are several urban local bodies without a single qualified urban planner. There are hardly twenty planning schools. Barring the top two or three, the rest are highly understaffed and the syllabus archaic. The institutional structures of planning are weak and are dominated by an engineering bureaucracy, whose world view frequently hovers within the ambit of 'tender-contract- project cycle', with hardly any scope for long-term strategic thinking.

Until recently, urban issues never figured prominently in India's public policy discourse, as the Gandhian maxim Rs 'India lives in villages' Rs held sway. The scenario started to change slowly with the launching of the JNNURM programme in 2005, and then in 2015, the  Modi government launched a plethora of urban-centric schemes, including the ambitious Smart Cities Mission.

However, if India wants to make the urbanisation process truly sustainable, it needs to get rid of its preoccupation with short-term projects with fancy acronyms and focus more on the fundamentals of urban management, through an overarching policy regime that would take into account its enormous regional diversity in settlement patterns.