Metropolitan Planning Agencies Global Networking: Key Actors for Implementing the New Urban Agenda

Metropolitan planning agencies and urban labs are one of the essential tools for implementing the New urban agenda. Metropolitan planning agencies are playing a key role in supporting local authorities in smart planning, designing and monitoring metropolitan and urban developments. These territorial engineering bodies are working at the metropolitan level in an integrated manner with urban and rural areas. They gathers multidisciplinary teams to deal with the complexity of metropolitan developments. They can take different status as public administration, association, foundation, but their purpose is to serve a complex governance system: inter sector, inter territorial, multilevel (from State to municipalities). Their role is to integrate intelligence in a complex system to make understandable for knowledge, and to prepare vision, strategy, policies, programs and projects to better managed cities and territories. Their role is essential to help decision makers to feed public debates and deliver sound analysis and proposals for city futures. The event will present the action of some metropolitan planning agencies (Paris, New York, Beijing, Dehli and Sao Paolo), and national networks of metropolitan planning agencies (France, Mexico, India and China) to discuss with global actors from States (UN-Habitat), local authorities (UCLG), civil society (World urban campaign and GAP), professionals (Habitat Professional Forum) and Funder (French cooperation agency). The “Metropolitan Planning Agencies global networking (MPA-gn) aims to become an advocacy platform to help states and local authorities to implement the new urban agenda and strengthen territorial engineering for cities to foster sustainable, resilient, secure and inclusive cities of tomorrow. Proposed by the French Network of Urban planning Agencies (FNAU) this initiative will be launched during the event and a charter for the creation of the “Metropolitan Planning Agencies global network” will be signed at the end of the event.