ESF/N-AERUS International Workshop Geneva, Palais des Nations - May 3-6, 2000 CITIES OF THE SOUTH: SUSTAINABLE FOR WHOM? ORGANIZATION

Download the provisional programme in *.rtf format The workshop will begin early in the afternoon of Wednesday, 3 May. The introductory session will review quickly in plenary the aims, problematic and the overall organization of the next three days' work. The second session, also in plenary, will open the debate on how southern urbanists and planners frame the crucial challenges to achieving both social development and environmental protection in thier cities. Within this debate the speakers will identify the extent to which conceptions of sustainable development in vogue internationally, and reflected in aid programmes and projects, address the felt needs of their cities. As with all subsequent sessions, there will be ample time for open discussion. The second day of the Workshop, Thursday, 4 May, will be reserved for intensive discussions in three working groups. The theme will be 'Innovations for Sustainable Development in Cities of the South'. Each working group will focus on one of three major categories of innovation affecting urban management and governance: (a) public policy; (b) technology and technical fixes and (c) participation and decision-making. As implied in the introduction above, real solutions will require a judicious balancing of technical, economic and social concerns. The presentations of innovative approaches will therefore also identify explicitly how one category of innovations is made viable by appropriate attention to concerns in the other two categories. Thus, for example, if an innovation in the technology category is to be successful, it must be socially and economically viable for low and very low-income groups, or somehow create externalities that make other options viable and satisfactory to those groups. The third day of the conference, Friday, 5 May, will be conducted in plenary, beginning with a recapitulation of the major issues and findings from the three working groups. This will be an 'Innovations Forum'. The following session will ask 'What Kinds of International Cooperation Contribute to Socially and Environmentally Sustainable Cities?' In the first part of the session, specialists on urban sector development cooperation will review the policies and impacts of European and multilateral aid affecting the quality of life in southern cities and will argue aid's merit in light of the previous days discussions of innovations. Afterwards there will be a presentation synthesizing the response to the call for papers on the question, what kinds of research would be most supportive to guiding development co-operation that truly supports sustainable development in southern cities? More specifically, participants should keep in mind the prospective roles for European assistance in the field and how the ESF/N-AERUS should attempt to inform this process. The meeting will then adjourn until late afternoon. Meanwhile a panel of well-known urbanists from both ESF/N-AERUS and from Southern cities will review the overall proceedings as preparation for their public debate on the topic "Interactions between Technical and Social Innovations, Development Assistance and Sustainable Development in Cities of the South". Underlying the debate will be the issue of how best to help the EU select and devise interventions truly supportive of sustainable development in the urban context. On the morning of Saturday, 6 May, ESF/N-AERUS members will convene to discuss networking matters.

PRESS RELEASE (May 2000) PRESS RELEASE (May 2000) CONTEXT AND OBJECTIVES WORKSHOP PAPERS ORGANIZATION REGISTRATION CALL FOR PAPERS FORMAT OF PROPOSALS AND PAPERS

N-AERUS: Network-Association of European Researchers on Urbanisation in the South
http://www.naerus.net