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The biggest obstacle to housing production is not money but the breakdown in communication between local and central governments, the mayor of Turkey’s sixth-largest city told Euronews at the World Urban Forum in Baku.
“What we see in other cities is actually the most important obstacle in the face of housing production, not the financial problem, but the communication problem between the central government and the local administration,” said Uğur İbrahim Altay, mayor of Konya and Executive President of the United Cities and Local Governments network.
Altay said housing built without integration into the wider city fails its residents. “We have to produce integrated housing with the city, not isolated,” Altay said.
“We also need to create an area where people can spend time with their children and families, where they can be happy, where they live.”
The view from Ramallah offered a different kind of experience. Ahmad Abulaban, City Director of Ramallah Municipality, said Palestinians had developed resilience out of necessity.
“We have been experts in crisis management because all the time we have to deal with different kinds of crisis, of challenges,” Abulaban told Euronews. “We believe in the three main phases of resilience: to survive, to adapt and to grow after any crisis.”
For Mauricio Rodas, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania and former mayor of Ecuador’s capital Quito, who held office when the city hosted the UN’s Habitat III conference in 2016, the defining feature of mayoral leadership was its accountability.
“Mayors are all about delivery. They are constantly under citizens’ scrutiny because everything that a mayor does impacts people’s everyday lives,” Rodas told Euronews.
“Mayors cannot afford to think about politics, to discuss ideology. They don’t have time for that. They have to work on the ground.”
Rodas noted that cities now produce 80% of global GDP, house more than half the world’s population and generate more than 70% of global CO2 emissions — making urban leadership inseparable from climate, economic and social policy.
The challenge of translating national housing policy into local delivery was illustrated by Dr Ani Binti Ahmad, President of Sepang Municipal Council in Malaysia, who described her authority as limited to implementing federal decisions.
“The policies of affordable houses are made at the federal level. What we do is follow whatever policy is made by the federal government,” she told Euronews.
“It is very challenging because you really have to deal with the developer, and sometimes the developer is profit-oriented.”
UN-Habitat has warned that without urgent intervention, up to 3 billion people could be living in slum conditions by 2050.