Potential Implications on Continuing Urbanisation

• Citizens can play a crucial role in identifying or actively intervening in urban chal­lenges, often providing new perspectives and solutions. The co-creation of strategies to tackle urban challenges is crucial for their success and it can rely on both established or new and experimental participatory methods.
• The research and policy agendas for citizen participation should be co-created with citizens and all relevant stakeholders and include appropriate and robust evaluation and impact mechanisms to enable effective engagement.
• Several lifestyle and behavioural changes can help city inhabitants to significantly reduce their environmental footprint, such as shifting to a healthy diet, reducing waste, using active or public mobility modes or choosing sustainable energy sources.
• There is a trend towards strengthening urban governance in the EU, leading to the recent establishment of a wide range of new governance bodies and arrange­ments across EU cities and metropolitan areas.
• Urban governance has gained a central role in global development efforts. At least 65% of the New Urban Agenda’s goals and their 169 targets can only be achieved at the local level, particularly in urban areas.
• Global commitments, advocacy, as well as mobilisation and socialisation through large networks such as the United Cities and Local Governments (UCLG), Metro­polis, C40, and the Global Covenant of Mayors, among others, are significantly empowering cities and accelerating the evolution of urban governance towards more horizontal cooperation, knowledge exchange and a demand for adequate resources for more and more decentralised competences and roles.

| Related Megatrends: Demography; Geopower; Security; Inequalities; Health; Climate change and environmental degradation; Consumerism; Technology; Natural resources;

• In future cities, we will need to optimise the distribution and use of public space to ensure that it is safe, accessible and inclusive for all.
• Provision of services could be improved by promoting the mixed use of land; developing integrated land use and mobility plans; and embracing new service-easing technologies.
• Cities will have to adjust their services in areas such as health care and mobility, as well as public infrastructure, housing, and social policy to cater to the changing demographics.
• Public spaces make up between 2 and 15% of land in city centres in Europe. Both their physical and social functions are essential and can relieve some of the pressures exerted on a city by a growing population.
• The greenness of European cities has increased by 38% over the last 25 years, with 44% of Europe’s urban population currently living within 300 metres of a public park. Well-designed public and green spaces can have a multitude of bene­fits: improving air quality, providing microclimate regulation, and enhancing safety, social integration and public health.

| Related Megatrends: Demography; Geopower; Security; Inequalities; Health; Climate change and environmental degradation; Consumerism; Technology; Natural resources;

• The 10 targets under SDG 11, "Make cities and human settlements inclusive, safe, resilient and sustainable", identified some key elements to be achieved and measured by 2030, and one third of the 232 SDG indicators can be measured at the local level, making the city an important unit for action and tracking of progress towards sustainable development.
• Moreover, multilevel governance is key to achieve the 2030 Agenda and its Sustainable Development Goals and cities and local governments play a key role in contributing to a number of issues.
• An increasing number of cities and local government in Europe and around the world have started measuring and evaluating their achievement towards the SDGs, and others have committed to do it soon.
• Despite the increasing targeted actions taken at the local level, how cities and regions can measure and assess their contribution in a harmonised way is still uncertain. The European Handbook for SDG Voluntary Local Reviews fills this gap. The handbook provides key examples of official and experimental indicators useful to set up an effective SDG local monitoring system specifically targeted for European cities. Per each Goal, the handbook highlights examples of harmonised and locally collected indicators so that local actors can both benchmark themselves with other cities and monitor their own specific needs and challenges.

| Related Megatrends: Demography; Geopower; Security; Inequalities; Health; Climate change and environmental degradation; Consumerism; Technology; Natural resources;