The New Urban Agenda: key opportunities and challenges for policy and practice

This is the author accepted manuscript. The final version is available from Taylor & Francis (Routledge) via the DOI in this record.The UN-HABITAT III conference held in Quito in late 2016 enshrined the first Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) with an exclusively urban focus. SDG 11, as it became known, aims to make cities more inclusive, safe, resilient and sustainable through a range of metrics, indicators, and evaluation systems. It also became part of a post-Quito ‘New Urban Agenda’ that is still taking shape. This paper raises questions around the potential for reductionism in this new agenda, and argues for the reflexive need to be aware of the types of urban space that are potentially sidelined by the new trends in global urban policy.This paper was the result of presentations and discussions at the ‘Measuring the (Un)Sustainable City’ workshop funded and enabled by the Urban Futures Research Domain at the Department of Geography, King’s College London, on 8 June 2016. Part of the work that contributed to the paper was funded by the Economic and Social Research Council (grant number ES/L015978/1 ‘Smart eco-cities for a green economy: a comparative study of Europe and China’)