Urban Upgrading for Post-COVID Sustainable and Inclusive Human Settlements in Islamic Development Bank (IsDB) Member Countries (MCs)
EVENT DETAILS
Date: 23 August 2021 Time: 13h30 - 15:30 Jeddah; 15h30 -17:30 Tashkent Venue: Online
COVID-19, declared a global pandemic by the WHO, is crippling the global economy and upsetting people’s lives thereby threatening sustainable development across all its dimensions. Urban areas are the epi-centers of the pandemic and over 95 percent of the confirmed COVID-19 cases are in urban areas. In just a few months, the pandemic has dramatically transformed the way people live, work, shop, and socialize globally. In response to pandemics, such as the COVID-19 virus, cities, particularly large, densely settled ones, will need to be supported by a new product line of assessment tools, planning guidelines, investments, and other disaster preparedness support that will help improve their resilience to and post-impact recovery from health-based natural disasters. A recent study from WHO/UN-Habitat has demonstrated the strong linkages between Health and Urban & Territorial Planning.
How to help human settlements against the pandemic?
There are several ways of supporting cities, slums, and informal settlements to be resilient against COVID-19. This resistance against the pandemic will include specially targeted measures to improve urban spacing, enhance health care facilities, and increase awareness of city populations of the actions to take to improve resilience against natural disasters, such as COVID-19. Achieving the “healthy cities approach” will require significant investments in our Member Countries (MC). Being a healthy city will rely upon a commitment to improve a city's environs and a willingness to forge the necessary connections in political, economic, and social arenas to i) provide a health-supportive environment ii) provide a good quality of life, iii) basic sanitation & hygiene needs, and iv) supply access to health care. In that regard, IsDB is well-positioned to be a supportive partner, bringing crucially needed technical know-how and financing to promote urban upgrading for post-COVID sustainable and inclusive development in its MCs.
Key Issues to be Address
- How best to respond, restore, restart: Post-COVID Resilience and Prosperity for All.
- Promoting and developing urban upgrading for post-COVID resilience.
- Financing programs for urban slums and informal settlements upgrading.
- Building back better and provision of key basic services in small towns: lessons learned from the pandemic.
- Alternative financing from donors, multilateral and bilateral development agencies, and international organizations.
- De-risking private sector involvement in slums and informal settlements upgrading.
See the list of panelists here: https://isdb-am.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/08/01-Brief-Urban-Upgrading-for-post-COVID-Sustainable-and-Inclusive-Human-Settlements-in-the-Arab-Region.pdf