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The Cities Alliance and Municipality of São Paulo
are pleased to announce the upcoming
International
Policy Dialogue on the “Challenges of Slum
Upgrading: Sharing São Paulo’s Experience,” taking
place in São Paulo from March 10th to 14th, 2008.
The São Paulo experience will serve as platform for
high level exchanges on urban policy featuring major
cities of the South which have been invited to
participate, including Cairo, Ekurhuleni, Lagos,
Manila, Mumbai. Collectively, these cities are home
to over 70 million people, are all faced with major
challenges of slum upgrading and have introduced
innovative, systemic responses to these challenges.
This Policy Dialogue
will be one of the first activities to be undertaken
within the context of the Cities Alliance’ Medium
Term Strategy, the goal of which is to increase its
contribution to systemic change, and to scale. The
objectives of this first targeted learning event of
its type for the Cities Alliance include:
-
To provide the
platform for a number of select Cities Alliance
partner cities to learn, in some detail, of the
policies and strategies that have been adopted
by São Paulo Municipality;
-
To use the visit
for a high-level policy dialogue on a number of
key issues in citywide upgrading in a mega-city
context;
-
To allow city
officials to present a summary of their
respective city challenges, and receive feedback
on their respective approaches to citywide
upgrading;
-
To provide the
opportunity for a informal network of city
officials to emerge.
Cities Alliance has worked with the Municipality of
São Paulo since 2001, through activities task
managed by the World Bank. The first Cities Alliance
grant to the city provided support for its
innovative Bairro Legal program, which sought
to introduce an integrated housing and upgrading
strategy, designed to extend secure tenure and
access to urban services through the integrated
actions of multiple municipal agencies, public
utilities, NGOs and civil society. For its role in
the Bairro Legal Program, the Municipality’s
Department of Housing (SEHAB) was awarded the 2004
Housing Rights award by the Center for Housing
Rights against Evictions (COHRE), because the
Program avoided the eviction of some 24,000
families.
Subsequent to the completion of the first phase of
support, the Cities Alliance approved a second
proposal, entitled
Strategies for the Sustainable Planning, Financing
and Implementation of Low-Income Housing and Urban
Development Policy. The main goal of this
phase of work is to expand and consolidate the
implementation of the Municipality’s housing policy,
especially in slum areas and informal subdivisions,
through strategies of sustainable financing and
strengthening of SEHAB’s management capacity.
Cities Alliance secretariat will monitor and
evaluate the impacts of the Policy Dialogue, to
inform similar initiatives in future. This will be
guided by the Cities Alliances’ new Monitoring and
Evaluation framework, which is in the process of
being finalised.
For more information on the International Policy
Dialogue:
Invitation and Program
(3 pages, 461 KB PDF)
Visit the
International Policy Dialogue Website:
English /
Português
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