Implementing the New Urban Agenda in Regions and Metropolitan Areas of Americas: a Vision to Balanced Territorial Development

Since 2014 and as result of the networking event “Towards an Inter‐American Platform for Cooperation on Metropolitan Planning and Development” held in Medellin, Colombia during the World Urban Forum 7 (WUF 7), the metropolitan areas of Montreal (Canada), Guadalajara (Mexico), San Salvador (El Salvador), Medellin and Bucaramanga (Colombia) established the Pan‐American Network on Metropolitan Areas (RAMA) with the support of UN-Habitat. Since then, UN-Habitat and RAMA’s activities have been centered in technical interchanges of expertise and best practices on metropolitan development and metropolitan management, and in the permanent debate about challenges and opportunities to implement the New Urban Agenda in metropolitan areas of Americas towards and after Habitat III. However, the urban agglomerations are not only metro areas, but also urban regions, which due to the scale and the territorial fragmentation, can only be addressed by supramunicipal institutions like the state governments. The side event “Implementing the New Urban Agenda in Regions and Metropolitan Areas of Americas: a vision to balanced territorial development” will present experiences accompanied by UN-Habitat across the Americas on regional and metropolitan development, from the planning, financing and governance perspective.