Sustaining peace in the city: fostering just and inclusive societies through urban safety
Background
Both the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development as well as UN-Habitat’s New Urban Agenda emphasize the need to give the city back to its residents through the promotion of strategies that help mitigate the effects of crime, violence and social exclusion – particularly in settings marked by rapid (and often uncontrolled) urbanization and/or armed conflict. Building on several years of work undertaken by the Technical Working Group on the Confluence of Urban Safety and Peacebuilding, convened by the Geneva Peacebuilding Platform in collaboration with the Swiss Confederation, UNOG and UN-Habitat, this project seeks to operationalize the call for a ‘Geneva Cities Forum’. This new initiative would consolidate Geneva’s unique set of stakeholders on the interface of human rights, humanitarian action, peacebuilding, development and migration in order to focus on the increasingly urban settings in which such work – and Switzerland’s contribution – is undertaken.
Objective
Constitute and maintain a strategic network of city level expertise and stakeholder communities, working on issues related to urban safety, in order to: i) enable the development of new solutions for city leaders; ii) combine research findings with cross-case comparisons in order to distil workable practices on the interface of sustainable urbanization and the pursuit of peaceful, just and inclusive societies; and iii) draw on Geneva as a hub for facilitating “collective impact” partnerships.
Expected Benefits
• On the global level: Greater collaboration within affected cities across practitioner silos, especially urban planners, architects, municipal government, the security sector and societal actors. The project is also expected to achieve a more sustained conversation across cities around the world, focusing not just on capitals and megacities, but also smaller, intermediary urban areas.
• In Switzerland. Establishment of ‘international Geneva’ [JS1] as a hub for urban development programming, building on its track record in the areas of violence prevention and reduction, security sector reform, humanitarian action and disaster risk reduction, migration, and human rights.
Contact Information
Dominic Eggel, , phone: +41 22 908 58 02
The Graduate Institute, Geneva
