Source: Peripheral Cities Forum of UCLG (FALP)
Local authorities present at the Seminar “Right to the City and Access to Metropolitan Areas for All” held in the Palestinian city of Aizaria (Metropolitan Area of Jerusalem) recall, more than ever, that our mainly urban planet cannot accept any form of urban apartheid.
Be it in the form of concrete; caused by money, colonization or geopolitics; be it visible or invisible: No wall, no ghetto, no colony, no gated community, can be accepted in our metropolitan areas. It is the dignity of inhabitants’ life, their capacity to decide on their present and their future, individual and collective, and to decide over their city, what is at stake here.
Our commitment for the “Right to the City” is based on understanding the City as a space to exercise citizenship, a place for the “good living”, to access individual and collective rights. Our commitment is focused on inhabitants’ life in our cities and the metropolitan areas which they share.
We are convinced that, by advancing in this direction, on the basis of our proximity to citizens and by developing local democracy, we will be able to tackle multiple forms of segregation; be it urban, social, space, political, colonial or ethnic.
The experience and the commitments of the city of Aizaria, in the specificity of the metropolitan area of Jerusalem, gives a concrete sense to these challenges. Challenges related to the “Right to the City” arise with a great acuity in this context and, more particularly, in East Jerusalem.
We commit to make the challenges experienced by our Palestinian partners of Aizaria be known in the framework of the global municipal movement in order to uphold international law.
More than ever, our urban planet needs to hear the voice of peripheral local authorities to reaffirm metropolitan areas as spaces of solidarity, democracy, inclusiveness, sustainability and polycentrism.
The Peripheral Cities Forum of UCLG commits to join the efforts in promoting the New Urban Agenda and acknowledges the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) of the United Nations as an opportunity to reduce inequalities in each one of our territories.
The Peripheral Cities Forum of UCLG will continue to promote this agenda with conviction and firmness. It will seek to make the experiences be known and practices shared in spaces of networking. The Forum also commits to engage in a dialogue with all stakeholders present in e metropolitan areas with a view to uphold the Right to the City and to the Metropolis as a fundamental and intangible condition for citizens’ life dignity.
The voice of the Peripheral Cities Forum of UCLG will be carried in many international events like the World Congress of UCLG in Durban (South Africa) next November.
And we recall that the next appointment for all local authorities in metropolitan areas will be in Pikine (Senegal) in January 2020, on the occasion of the next edition of the Peripheral Cities Forum of UCLG.