What the City Means to Youth

Through the New Urban Agenda (NUA) articles – adopted by 193 State member countries in the Third UN conference for Housing and Sustainable Urban Development (Habitat III) – a number of promises were made for youth and their inclusion in the urbanization process of the coming 20 years. The promises varied from promises for accessibility to adequate housing and the rights to respective services, opportunities for youth in urban economic development, opportunities in employment, in education and safe urban mobility. Little was emphasized as opportunities for responsibilities take. Yet, there were references in the implementation section to active participation with relative governments for urban development decision making, enabling and promoting capacity building of youth for shaping governance processes in urban planning, land management and services accessibility.
Similar to other partner groups with the NUA, the role of youth through the articles seem to be quite undefined and unprecise. Yet it cannot be denied that the youth of today will be the implementers of the current agenda and the experts/evaluators of the agenda impact for the coming Habitat conference (Habitat IV). Thus, it remains of great importance to involve the youth and actively encourage their taking part of the process to identify their role in implementing the NUA in Egypt and taking ownership in the process.
We would thus, this like to invite you to attend an active workshop on “What the City means to Youth”. The workshop aims to explore the meaning of the physical, social, psychological aspects of your city today and in the future for you. In addition to that we aim to explore how international agendas like the New Urban Agenda adopted in Habitat III conference could entail promising change to the Egyptian context.
The workshop is a part of the “Implementing the New Urban Agenda in Egypt” project, led by the Ministry of Housing, Utilities and Urban Communities (MoHUUC) and implemented by Deutsche Gesellschaft für Internationale Zusammenarbeit (GIZ) GmbH, as part of its ongoing efforts to guide the urban policy of Egypt through an ‘urban dialogue’. We are looking forward to the attendance
In Preparation for the session,
 Read the NUA and select articles that affect the youth, to be discussed
 Read the issue paper related to inclusive cities, http://habitat3.org/wp-content/uploads/Habitat-III-Issue-Paper-1_Inclusive-Cities-2.0.pdf
 Read the SDGs – Goal 11- https://unhabitat.org/un-habitat-for-the-sustainable-development-goals/

Moderator Bibliography:
Khaled Abdelhalim graduated as an architect and planner from Cairo University in 1990, received M.A. in architecture: housing studies from the University of Newcastle, UK in 1995, and Ph.D. in housing policy, planning and practice from the University of Central England in Birmingham, UK in 2003. He worked for more than six years for Deutsche Gesellschaft für Internationale Zusammenarbeit (GIZ) GmbH, in participatory upgrading of informal areas. He also worked as a consultant to UN Habitat for strategic planning of governorates in Egypt and contributed to a number of Habitat regional reports. Abdelhalim had been the director of the Local Development Observatory at the Local Administration Reform Unit from 2010-2013; a UNDP program supporting the Ministry of Local Development on decentralization, local development and governance reforms. Then, he became the program director from 2014-2015. Abdelhalim is currently an assistant professor of urban policy at AUC, in the Public Policy and Administration Department at the School of Global Affairs and Public Policy. Abdelhalim has publications, studies and a combination of research and practice interests in the fields of informality, participatory development, local governance and local administration reform.
*Event will be in Arabic
*Location: Megawra al-Khalifa (Khalifa community center)
A Google map showing the directions to Megawra al-Khalifa: http://goo.gl/lvAu0C