Thematic Meeting: Civic Engagement

7 September 2015 – Tel Aviv, Israel

Venue: The Suzanne Dellal Centre

Within the Cities Summit event, the City of Tel Aviv hosted the first Habitat III Thematic Meeting, with a focus on Civic Engagement.

The city of Tel Aviv grapples with a variety of challenges but has formulated innovative solutions to many of them. Challenges the city faces include population growth, absorbing migrant populations, building sustainable infrastructure, encouraging active civic participation, and ensuring that all sectors of society benefit from the city’s thriving high-tech industry, among other issues.

Cities need to develop sustainable mechanisms that will enable their citizens to develop capacity and experience in civic responsibility, to broaden democratic platforms and responsible governance. This was a twofold challenge, for the city to again become a democratic arena and for its residents to reinvent themselves as citizens instead of consumers of services. Civic engagement needs to become an everyday practice, embedded into city life at all levels of municipal and community activities.

The Thematic Meeting discussed such issues at the global level in preparation for Habitat III that ensures to address them in Quito in October 2016.

The Tel Aviv Declaration is considered part of the official inputs to the Habitat III process.

Find the news release on the Thematic Meeting on Civic Engagement here.