The Sustainable Development Goals and the New Urban Agenda recognise the role of cities in achieving sustainable development. However, these agendas were agreed and signed by national governments and thus implementing them at the local level requires a process of adaptation or localisation. In this paper, we analyse five aspects that practitioners and researchers need to consider when localising them: (1) delimitation of the urban boundary; (2) integrated governance; (3) actors; (4) synergies and trade-offs and (5) indicators. These considerations are interrelated, and while not exhaustive, provide an important initial step for reflection on the challenges and opportunities of working with these global agendas at the local level. The paper draws on the inception phase of an international comparative transdisciplinary research project in seven cities on four continents: Buenos Aires

Urban resilience is increasingly seen as essential to managing the risks and challenges arising in a globally changing, connected, and urbanized world. Hence, cities are central to achieving a range of global development policy commitments adopted over the past few years, ranging from the Paris Climate Agreement to the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). However, knowledge of the ways in which cities are going about implementing resilience or of how such efforts can practically contribute to the implementation of global agendas is still limited. This paper discusses the experience of cities that were members of the 100 Resilient Cities (100RC) network, an entity pioneered by The Rockefeller Foundation. It reviews the resilience strategies developed by 100RC members to show that 100RC cities are increasingly aligning their resilience work to global development policies such as the SDGs. It then draws on the case of the city of Cape Town in South Africa to illustrate the process of developing a resilience strategy through 100RC tools and methodologies including the City Resilience Framework (CRF) and City Resilience Index (CRI) and its alignment to the SDGs and reflects on lessons and learnings of Cape Town’s experience for the global city network-policy nexus post-2015.

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The urban studies literature has extensively analysed the modernist, developmental or neoliberal drivers of urban restructuring in the global South, but has largely overlooked the ways in which governments, particularly those with authoritarian characteristics, try to reinforce their legitimacy and assert their political authority through the creation of satellite cities and housing developments. From Ethiopia to Singapore, authoritarian regimes have recently provided housing to the middle class and the poor, not only to alleviate housing shortages, or bolster a burgeoning real estate market, but also to ‘order power’ and buy the loyalty of residents. To evaluate the extent to which authoritarian regimes realise their political objectives through housing provision, we survey nearly 300 poor and middle class respondents from three new housing projects in Luanda, Angola. Alongside increasing social and spatial differentiation brought about by state policies, we document unintended beneficiaries of state housing and uneven levels of citizen satisfaction. We explain that internal state contradictions, individual agency and market forces have acted together to re-shape the government’s efforts to order power.

The New Urban Agenda (NUA) and Agenda 2030's Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) recognise the key role of 'sub-national entities', including cities, in achieving sustainable development. However, since these global policy agendas were agreed and signed by national governments, implementing them at the local level requires a process of localisation to fit local realities. This paper analyses the national guidance (or lack of) and the resultant collaborations emerging between various levels of government in the implementation of these agendas in African cities, namely Kisumu, Kenya and Cape Town, South Africa. It argues that effective implementation of the SDGs requires a strong framework for multi-stakeholder engagement and coordination at all levels of governance, which is possible if both top-down and bottom-up approaches are used concurrently and harmonised.

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The need to make cities in Africa more inclusive, safe, resilient and sustainable (Sustainable Development Goal 11) is undisputed as rapid urban growth rates are set to make the African region a key hub in the global transition to a predominantly urban world. This perspective presents findings from a research project conducted in the cities of Luanda, Angola and Maputo, Mozambique, which used citizen science to generate data on selected indicators of the urban Sustainable Development Goal and use this data to inform more inclusive, sustainable and participatory urban planning and policymaking. Based on the research, we argue that meeting SDG 11 will ultimately depend on the spaces and mechanisms for knowledge co-production and sharing that are produced in the process.