Summary of Asia Pacific Urban Youth Assembly at APUF-6

This is a summary of Asia Pacific Urban Youth Assembly at APUF-6, this summary is being finalized.

Social Cohesion and Equity

Livable Cities

• Protect and respect the rights of children and youth, providing an enabling environment for them to advocate for and claim their rights to the city and contribute to urban policies.
• Address inequality within and between countries as well as within and between cities and regions and between urban and rural areas, throughout the process. We cannot call for an end to extreme poverty without also calling for an end to extreme wealth.
• Address urban safety and crime and violence prevention by including children and youth in the process of creating safer cities and neighborhoods.
• Ensure Inclusive and safe spaces for all, regardless of diverse sexual orientation, gender identities, religion, ethnicity, documentation, disability or other status.

 

Urban Framework

Socio-Cultural Urban Framework

• Preserve and make accessible the cultural, natural, archaeological, and structural heritage of cities.
• Respect and protect diversity of culture, language, and practices of all population subgroups, regardless of or social status.
• Ensure that every person, regardless of status, receives equal access to social, educational,public services, and universal health care services (WHO standards) in the urban context.

National Urban Policies

• Include all stakeholders in designing, implementing, and monitoring national urban policies through participatory planning and budgeting.
• Implement community-led assessment mechanisms for the social, environmental, and economic impacts of all policies.
• Policy formation should be informed by scientific evidence and contextualised within environmental thresholds.
• The thematic content of the policies should follow a rights-based approach, that delinks any status of a person to their ability to enjoy its meaningful implementation.
• Governance mechanisms must institutionalise and incorporate children and youth to ensure accountability.

Urban governance, capacity, and institutional development

• Absolute transparency in electoral processes to enable inhabitants to elect responsible and accountable municipal representatives in the various positions of the governing bodies.
• The participation and inclusion of stakeholders, especially the most vulnerable and marginalised, from all geographical areas (urban, rural and hardest to reach) towards planning, budgeting, governance and management, must be ensured and go beyond ‘dialogue’ to enable joint decision making

Municipal finance and fiscal systems

• Implementation of ecological tax reform and taxation of social externalities in conjunction with progressive taxation in order to dissuade underlying risk factors.
• A city’s macroeconomic environment needs to incorporate adjustments that incentivise finance in line with sustainable urbanisation. Ecological risk integration to sovereign credit should be adapted to the municipal level.

Spatial Development

• Public spaces are a right and should be planned in a manner that guarantees adequate and equitable accessibility for residents irrespective of any status.
• The nature of urban spaces should seek to increase civic participation, foster peaceful coexistence, promote dialogue among urban residents and coincide with other policy objectives such as health, transportation and mobility.
• City and youth are the knowledge bearers of the city and their communities who are capable of playing an active role in improving the management , maintenance and delivery of public spaces.

Urban Economy

• The rights and skills of workers in the informal sector must be recognised and protected as such, and they should be included in social protection programs.
• Accessibility to quality education and livelihoods must be recognised as a key mechanism to transform cities into inclusive centres of growth and agency for children and youth.
• Cooperatives should be structurally incentivised through policy environment in line with implementing UN General Assembly Resolution 64/136 on the International Year of Cooperatives (2012).

Urban Ecology and Environment

• The ecological footprint of cities must not exceed the biocapacity and must remain within environmental thresholds and local scopes for planetary boundaries.
• The New Urban Agenda should mainstream resilience in aspects by strengthening mitigation and adaptation initiatives to tackle and reverse land degradation, biodiversity loss and climate change.

Urban Housing and Basic Services

Urban services and technology

• While realising its benefits, technology impact assessments on the social, economic, and environmental dimensions of development should be employed to promote harmonious co-existence with urban scapes by avoiding deformation of natural environments, exploitation of resources beyond natural thresholds.
• Widening the technology gap risks further marginalising people in society, in this regard technology should be used to close socioeconomic gaps in cities, enable access to information and basic services, facilitate eco-friendly lifestyles, and provide an infrastructure for sustainable development into the future to match the needs of the next urban agenda.
• Sustainable urbanisation needs to encompass universal access to quality education which includes comprehensive sexual education for all young people. Educational infrastructures should adopt and utilise informal, non-formal education, peer learning, and the inclusion of indigenous knowledge.
• Free and accessible birth certificate registration systems must support the implementation, monitoring and review of above objectives.

Housing policies

• Housing is a human right and should be operationalised as such. The agenda needs to prioritise access for all to adequate, safe and affordable housing and basic services, as well as adequate and equitable access to public spaces and parks (within a 5 minute walk of every household).
• Provision of housing for particular group of populations, including young people, refugees and internally displaced persons must be addressed by planners and local governments through a rights-based approach. In addition, housing policies must be sensitive to people with disabilities.
• Cities should acknowledge that housing is part of human rights.
• Cities should engage all citizens in physical and service planning processes and implementation in an effort to prioritise access
• for all to adequate, safe and affordable housing and basic services, as well as adequate and equitable access to public spaces.
• Provision of housing for particular group of populations such as young and old people, people with disabilities, refugees and internally displaced persons, must be addressed by planners and local governments through a rights-based approach.