UN Conference on Human Settlements – Habitat

As governments recognized the need for sustainable human settlements and the consequences of rapid urbanization, especially in the developing world, the United Nations General Assembly (UNGA) convened the Habitat I conference in Vancouver, Canada, in 1976. The Vancouver commitments were reconfirmed twenty years later, at the Habitat II conference in Istanbul, Turkey in 1996. World leaders adopted the Habitat Agenda as a global plan of action for adequate shelter for all, with the notion of sustainable human settlements driving development in an urbanizing world. Habitat III, the United Nations Conference on Housing and Sustainable Urban Development, took place in Quito, Ecuador, in October 2016. Habitat III reinvigorated the global commitment to sustainable urbanization and ratified the “New Urban Agenda,” building on the Habitat Agenda of Istanbul.