The Urban Brief

Cities are often presented as products of planning, shaped through data, technical expertise, and formal systems of governance. Yet this framing only captures part of how cities actually function.

Much of what makes urban systems work is negotiated daily by residents who navigate gaps in infrastructure, organise around shared needs, and respond to risks that institutions are not always able to address in time.

For decades, community engagement has been positioned as a way to bridge this gap. In practice, however, it is often structured as consultation, invited at specific moments and bounded by predefined agendas, without always translating into sustained influence over decisions.

Participation, in this sense, can become visible and measurable, but still remain disconnected from how planning priorities are ultimately set.

At the same time, a growing body of work across research, practice, and policy is beginning to reframe this relationship. Communities are not only responding to cities, but actively shaping them; collecting and producing data, managing shared resources, and coordinating responses to challenges such as climate risk, service delivery, and urban development. These forms of engagement are not always easily integrated into formal systems, but they are increasingly central to how cities adapt, particularly where institutional capacity is uneven.

This raises a more fundamental question for urban governance: if communities are already playing a significant role in shaping cities, what does it mean to continue treating them as peripheral to planning? The examples in this edition explore this shift in practice - from community-led tourism and heat adaptation to citizen-generated data and new forms of participation - pointing to a broader rethinking of engagement, not simply as an input into planning, but as a space where urban systems are continuously shaped and reworked.

Source: UN-Habitat website →

Models & Programs for Youth’s Governance & Participation in Planning: More Inclusive & Sustainable Cities, published by UN-Habitat, examines a range of global initiatives to understand how young people engage in urban governance and planning processes. Drawing on programmes supported by UN-Habitat and other partners, the report analyses models of participation, from consultative approaches to youth-led and co-governed initiatives, and assesses their effectiveness in shaping policy and planning outcomes.

A key insight from the report is that participation is most effective when it moves beyond one-off consultation toward sustained engagement, where young people are involved not only in discussions but also in research, data collection, and knowledge production that informs planning processes. These approaches shift participation from expression to co-production of evidence, generating more grounded and context-specific inputs into urban planning, particularly where formal data systems are limited.

One example of this approach is the Young Gamechanger Initiative, implemented in Jatni (India) alongside Armenia (Colombia) and Bargny (Senegal). Supported by Foundation Botnar, UN- Habitat, the World Health Organisation, and Block by Block Foundation, the programme uses tools such as Minecraft to enable young people to express and develop visions for more equitable and healthy city systems. Over a three-year engagement, it works with municipalities, researchers, and civil society partners to translate these contributions into structured inputs for planning processes, and tracks how youth participation influences institutional practices and public space outcomes.

A broader pattern emerges from these initiatives. As participation becomes more structured, communities are increasingly involved not only as stakeholders but as contributors to the production of knowledge and data that inform urban planning decisions. However, community- generated knowledge is not always formally recognised within planning systems, and questions of standardisation, validation, and ownership continue to limit its uptake. Strengthening urban governance, therefore, will depend not only on expanding participation, but on creating pathways for communities to contribute to how knowledge about the city is produced and used.

Click here to read the report →

Data from Citizenship, Inequality, and Urban Governance in India: Findings from 14 Cities (Patrick Heller, Siddharth Swaminathan, Ashutosh Varshney et al., 2025) show that while many urban residents do participate in civic life, this engagement is typically limited to a single channel, whether attending ward committee meetings, joining resident welfare associations, or taking part in neighbourhood-level action. What is notably rare is sustained participation across multiple spaces: engagement tends to be episodic rather than embedded.

This unevenness becomes clearer across cities. In Bhubaneswar, residents are nearly twice as active as in Delhi, pointing not just to differences in participation levels but in the kinds of civic ecosystems that cities enable. In some places, like Kochi, participation is more likely to take the form of civic or professional associations; in others, particularly across parts of Gujarat, it is more often organised through identity-based groups. Who participates also varies. In many cities, residents in informal settlements are less likely to be part of associations than middle- and higher-income groups, though in some contexts, this pattern reverses, suggesting that participation is shaped as much by local conditions as by structural inequality.

Rather than a simple absence of engagement, the picture that emerges is more uneven: participation exists, but is spread thinly across different channels, shaped by place, and rarely sustained across the multiple forums through which urban governance actually operates.

Access the report here →

Climate Asia’s Annual Conference 2026, to be held on 22–23 April in New Delhi, is centred on Building India’s Climate Ecosystem: Innovation, Talent, Leadership. It comes at a moment when India’s climate transition is moving from intent to implementation at scale, bringing questions of institutional capacity, coordination across sectors, and the governance of climate action into sharper focus.

At the heart of the convening is a shared challenge: how community-led climate solutions can access the institutional support, finance, and visibility needed to grow, and how climate action can be more closely aligned with development outcomes. Bringing together leaders and practitioners across policy, finance, philanthropy, and the wider climate ecosystem, the conference creates space for exchange, learning, and collaboration across sectors.

Register here →