Know Your City: Creating a Joint Knowledge Base to Transform Cities and their Relationships with Informal Settlements

This event will unpack the Know Your City (KYC) campaign – a joint initiative of Shack / Slum Dwellers International (SDI), United Cities Local Governments-Africa (UCLGA) and Cities Alliance, – that seeks joint information collection to produce change in cities. The event will highlight the ways this joint project supports collaborative planning between organised communities of the urban poor and their local authorities, using data collected by the poor, about the poor and for the poor as standard benchmarking data for urban policy makers and planners. This event will draw on examples from SDI, Cities Alliance and UCLG-A’s joint work in Uganda, Ghana, Zambia, and Kenya, to highlight the effective use of community-collected data as the basis of collaborative planning between organized communities of the urban poor and local and national government authorities. The key takeaway from this event is that organized communities of the urban poor and cities 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 and why cities should do this and present case studies that explore how partnerships around data collection are leading to innovative upgrading solutions at scale. In addition, we will feature a launch and demonstration of the updated Know Your City web-based data platform to be launched at Habitat III. This will include community-collected data on 1,500+ slums across the Global South, including data on housing conditions, access to basic services such as water, sanitation, and energy, employment, tenure security, and more.