Cities came last and arrived first
The review opened with a piece of institutional history that explains a decade of neglect. SDG 11 was drafted late, almost as an afterthought, and ten years on the goal has turned out to sit underneath most of the others. The session ran alongside the tenth anniversary of the New Urban Agenda, whose mid-term review follows the week after.
The numbers presented from the Secretary-General’s progress report set the terms. The slum population has climbed to 1.16 billion, roughly one in four urban residents in 2024, and could pass 1.2 billion by 2030. Access to convenient public transport rose from 53.2% to 61.5% between 2020 and 2025. Only about 17% of urban land is given to streets and public open space, against a target range of 30% to 45%.
Housing as the keystone
Rossbach’s argument, consistent with the press briefing she gave that morning, is that housing is not one sector among several. It is the precondition for the others, and the reason SDG 11 propagates into education, health and employment outcomes.
She was blunt about where the failure sits, calling a billion people in informal settlements unacceptable and warning against another generation of children born in slums. She also named an exclusion that planning rarely admits.
Katherine Kline, the lead discussant, pressed the same point into a method. The solutions are known; the deficit is in how they are produced and scaled.
Lagos, and the minibus problem
Abimbola Akinajo, who runs Lagos’s transport authority, supplied the review’s most practical testimony. Lagos holds roughly 22 million people, takes in two to three thousand more every day, and generates about 30 million trips daily. Her first argument was governance: national governments adopt the Agenda and then leave it at the national level.
Her second was that the informal minibus, the danfo in Lagos and the matatu elsewhere, cannot carry a growing city, and that mass transit is the only arithmetic that works. Her third cut against the framing of the whole goal: the pressure on cities originates outside them. What drives urban population, she argued, is the absence of infrastructure in rural places, so cities cannot be fixed by working only on cities.
Mapping the invisible
The measurement thread ran through the whole afternoon, and Rossbach put it most directly. A city plans for the people it can see, and it cannot see the ones who never enter a dataset.
The interactive discussion turned into an unusually concrete exchange on how cities are counted. Voluntary Local Reviews were the dominant instrument: Zambia is targeting a review for all 116 of its local authorities by 2028, Italy folded 14 local reviews into its national review, Norway, Malaysia, Belgium, Portugal and Indonesia all reported local review programmes, and Germany described an open-source AI platform in Hamburg for producing them. Poland reported an SDG experimental statistics platform built on geospatial and Earth-observation data, feeding a toolkit for municipalities. Akinajo’s closing plea was for data linking across agencies rather than more data collection, so that cities stop working in silos.
Speaking for the Group of Friends on Science for Action, India supplied the sentence that connects this review to Science Day, held that same morning and moderated, like this session, by Robbert Dijkgraaf.
Why it matters for the SDGs
SDG 11 is the fourth of the five goals under in-depth review in 2026, and this session showed why it behaves less like a sector and more like a substrate: it carries SDG 1 (poverty), SDG 10 (inequality), SDG 13 (climate) and SDG 6 (water) inside it. Around 2 billion more people are expected to move to cities in the coming decades, concentrated in Africa and Southeast Asia. The counting problem is the one to watch. A goal about cities is measured mostly by national statistics, and the residents least likely to appear in those statistics are exactly the billion-plus living in the settlements the goal exists to reach.
Watch & read
- UN Web TV, recording of the HLPF 2026 6th meeting (9 July 2026).
- UN-Habitat on renewing commitments to sustainable cities, the press briefing earlier the same day.
- UN-Habitat SDG 11 Synthesis Report, the review’s evidence base.
- World Cities Report 2026, the separate UN-Habitat flagship on the housing crisis. Our brief.
- Science Day 2026 · Full HLPF 2026 coverage.
Quotations are lightly edited from an automated (Otter.ai) transcript of the UN Web TV recording and should be read as close paraphrase. Speaker names and titles were reconciled against the official HLPF annotated programme and public records. Roughly fifty delegations took the floor; interventions delivered in Arabic, Chinese, French and Spanish were not usable from the transcript, so those countries’ positions are not summarised here. Statements are attributed to countries rather than to individuals, and figures cited by delegations were not independently verified.