This is Know Your City: Using community-collected data for successful implementation of the New Urban Agenda

This event will highlight the expansion of the Know Your City campaign – a joint initiative of SDI, Cities Alliance and UCLG-A that focuses on the power of community-driven slum data to drive partnerships for collaborative planning and development. In the time between Habitat III and WUF9, SDI will have collected citywide slum data on 100 cities across the Global South. We will showcase how the data is being used across the SDI network to track and demonstrate improved conditions in the lives of slum dwellers and present the Know Your City toolkit as a grassroots tool to monitor and implement the New Urban Agenda across cities of the Global South towards the successful achievement of the SDGs. In particular, we will highlight the potential of this toolkit to track and prevent evictions - demonstrating what is possible when slum dwellers have the necessary tools to proactively negotiate for eviction alternatives before evictions take place. Evidence continues to suggest that successful implementation of the New Urban Agenda to achieve the Sustainable Development Goals will depend largely on the extent to which urban decision makers, particularly city governments, partner with organised communities of the urban poor to co-produce innovative development and upgrading solutions at scale. This event focuses on the significant impact that such collaborative efforts between city governments and city-wide community networks are making when urban data produced by the poor and for the poor is used as the basis for collective decision-making and development. Drawing on examples from across the SDI network, we will demonstrate the impact generated by the effective use of community-collected data for collaborative planning and development that creates alternatives to evictions and the potential of these methodologies to be applied at scale for the millions of slum dwellers in cities worldwide. The key takeaway from this event is that every city can and should be generating data on poverty with the poor, by the poor, and for the poor, and that this data should serve as the basis for all city development and upgrading strategies. This event will help answer questions of how & why cities should do this & present case studies that explore how such partnerships are leading to innovative upgrading solutions at scale.