9 June 2016: The UN Human Settlements Programme (UN-HABITAT) launched a tool to measure global and regional urbanization and analyze the effects of urban sprawl on quality of life. UN-HABITAT released the ‘UN Sample of Cities’ in advance of the Third UN Conference on Housing and Sustainable Urban Development (Habitat III). It was tested and applied in a collaboration between UN-Habitat, New York University’s (NYU) Urban Expansion Program, and the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy.

The ‘UN Sample of Cities’ tracks and interprets trends related to urban life such as air and water quality, housing affordability, access to enjoyable public space, physical proximity to employment and time to travel from home to work, in order to examine impacts of global and regional urbanization on the quality of human life. The report uses data from 200 cities to examine similarities and differences in cities’ evolution, with the broader aim of identifying ways to harness the power of cities to improve the lives of urban dwellers. The project also has the potential to contribute to Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) 11 (Make cities and human settlements inclusive, safe, resilient and sustainable).

“The unprecedented confluence of climate change, population boom and the rush to live in cities means that our critical human development will take place in cities,” UN-HABITAT Executive Director Joan Clos said during the report launch, at UN headquarters in New York, US, on 9 June 2016. Clos stressed that understanding the effects of cities and urbanization on quality of human life should “be treated as a science,” and encouraged researchers and others to use the data to study the evolution of urbanization. The report includes open-source data that researchers can use to compare world cities.

The collaborators on UN Sample of Cities are conducting additional research using the tool, on housing affordability, the proportion of public and private space, and regulatory regimes governing land and housing, among other topics. [UN Press Release] [UN-HABITAT Press Release]