UN-Habitat on renewing commitments to sustainable cities (HLPF briefing)

Session: Press briefing, “Renewing Commitments on Sustainable Cities and Communities,” launching UN-Habitat’s synthesis report on SDG 11 for the 2026 review
Speakers: Anacláudia Rossbach (Under-Secretary-General and Executive Director, UN-Habitat); Erastus Lokaale (Permanent Representative of Kenya to the UN); Shirley Pryce (member, UN-Habitat Advisory Group on Gender Issues, and President of the Jamaica Household Workers Union)
Context: Held the same day as, and hours before, the HLPF in-depth review of SDG 11, and ahead of the high-level meeting on the mid-term review of the New Urban Agenda

Possible, but not fast enough

UN-Habitat brought the SDG 11 evidence base to the press the morning of the goal’s in-depth review. The Executive Director’s summary held both halves of the finding together rather than resolving them, which is the honest reading of the data.

Anacláudia Rossbach, UN-Habitat: “The report shows that progress is possible, but it is neither fast enough nor equitable enough to achieve SDG 11 by 2030.”

The progress is real and measurable. Across 126 countries there are advances to report, and the share of the urban population with convenient access to public transport rose from 53.2% in 2020 to 61.5% in 2025 across the 123 countries with data. Four in ten urban residents still lack that access. Disasters affected an average of 123 million people a year between 2015 and 2024.

Housing is the binding constraint

The report names housing as the most urgent challenge, and the direction of travel is the wrong one. More than a billion people now live in slums and informal settlements, an increase of over 130 million since 2015. Around 3 billion people lack adequate housing, and nearly half of all households worldwide spend more than 30% of income on rent.

Anacláudia Rossbach: “Adequate housing is the foundation of sustainable cities and communities. Housing is not only about shelter, it determines access to transport, employment, education, healthcare, public space and economic opportunities.”

Rossbach’s framing of the cause was the sharpest line of the briefing, and it moves the problem out of the housing ministry.

Anacláudia Rossbach: “This report reminds us that the housing crisis is fundamentally a crisis of inequality.”

The prescription follows: in-situ upgrading of slums and informal settlements in partnership with residents, who the report says must be recognized as co-producers of solutions rather than beneficiaries of them. Kenya’s Permanent Representative, Erastus Lokaale, described adequate housing as an enabler not only of SDG 11 but of the other goals, and set national numbers against the ambition: an estimated annual demand of 250,000 housing units against a supply of roughly 50,000.

Care as urban infrastructure

The most striking contribution came from Shirley Pryce, who has organized Jamaica’s domestic workers for decades and sits on UN-Habitat’s gender advisory group. She pressed two claims the report’s own language supports but rarely operationalizes.

Shirley Pryce: “If we truly want inclusive, resilient, and sustainable cities, then we must recognize care as part of the essential urban infrastructure.”

Shirley Pryce: “We are not beneficiaries of development, we are partners in development.”

Her objection to consultation-as-ritual, that communities are too often consulted after the decisions have already been made, is the practical test of the report’s co-production language.

The counting angle

Rossbach was explicit that urban policy is constrained by what cities can see. Since 2020 an additional 44 countries have substantially strengthened urban monitoring and SDG 11 reporting, and 101 countries now report more than half the data for ten SDG 11 targets. That is real progress on a goal long hampered by the absence of city-level statistics.

The gap it leaves is the one the briefing kept returning to. Community-led studies, including in Rio de Janeiro, have measured temperature differences of 8 to 10 degrees Celsius between a city and its informal settlements. A national or even municipal average erases that. Disaggregated, timely data, gathered with residents, is what makes the inequality inside a city legible at all.

Why it matters for the SDGs

This is SDG 11 (sustainable cities and communities), one of the five goals under in-depth review in 2026, with strong links to SDG 1 (poverty), SDG 10 (inequality) and SDG 13 (resilience). Roughly 2 billion more people are expected to move to cities in the coming decades, concentrated in Africa and Southeast Asia. The report’s argument is that the solutions are known and the question is whether governments will finance them and treat residents as partners. The next four years, as Rossbach framed it, decide whether cities become engines of inclusion or places where inequality deepens.

Watch & read

UN Web TV, recording of the press briefing (9 July 2026).
UN-Habitat SDG 11 Synthesis Report, the report launched at this briefing.
World Cities Report 2026, UN-Habitat’s separate flagship on the global housing crisis, launched in May. Our brief.
The SDG 11 review, the HLPF in-depth review held that afternoon, where Rossbach was a panellist.
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 public records; the transcript garbled all three. Speakers referred to the report as the “SDG 11 Global Report 2026”; UN-Habitat publishes it as the SDG 11 Synthesis Report, and it is a different publication from the flagship World Cities Report 2026 launched in Baku in May 2026. Figures are as cited at the briefing and were not independently verified against the report text.