 Hello everyone and thank you for joining us for this week's lecture in planning series. My name is Maureen Abyranum and I'm a PhD student here in Columbia's urban planning program and I'll be moderating the session. Today, as part of GSAP's career month, we welcome a panel of practitioners working in international organizations. Our panel discussion is with Kate Owens, principal consultant and adjunct professor at Columbia's GSAP, Aleem Rahbani, urban programming technical director at World Vision International, and Samar Saliba, head of practice at the mayor's migration council. Before introducing our speakers, I will start with a few brief logistical announcements and then launch into what I hope will be a spirited and informative discussion. So during the talk, I'd like to remind audience members to please mute their microphones. We will be recording today's panel so anyone in the audience who wishes not to be recorded should turn off their video input. The chat box should be used only for discussion or questions regarding the session. If you have any technical questions that apply only to you, please message me or my co-host Joe Hennickens privately. After the speakers' presentations, we will have time for Q&A. We'll start Q&A around 2 p.m. so that we have enough time for everyone's questions and I'll be coordinating the Q&A with attention to diversity and inclusion. So if you have already had the chance to ask a question, please allow others to do so before asking another one. And to ask a question, participants can either use the raise the hand feature in Zoom and we will call on you to unmute, or you may also type your questions in the chat box throughout the presentations and I can read them out loud during the Q&A session. So today's panel is titled International Planning, Addressing Urban Inequities. With that, I'm delighted to introduce our panelist for today. Kate Owens is Principal Consultant and Adjunct Professor at Columbia's GISA. She has been working at the intersection of sustainable transport, housing and urban planning for nearly 20 years. Kate's career has spanned international and domestic planning by helping analyze and design housing and infrastructure projects in more than 30 cities. Kate holds a BA in Public Policy and Economics from the University of Chicago and a PhD in Planning from the University of Michigan. Kate's talk today, Advocating for Sustainable Cities, reflects on international urban narratives. She will begin by introducing the network of international planning institutions and then narrow down on three global development projects she was engaged in. The first, alone by the World Bank for Tanzania's green infrastructure. The second, describes the process of advocating and setting up an urban finance lab in India and Mexico with WRI. And the third depicts an asset management strategy with HRNA. Our second speaker, Aline Rahmani, is the Urban Programming Technical Director at World Vision International. Aline is a Lebanese based in Toronto since 2018. She holds a master's degree in public health from the American University of Beirut with a focus on community development and health behavior. She has been in the 8th sector for over 10 years. At World Vision International, she works with more than 70 country offices on strategy and programming support to offices that prioritize addressing urban poverty and violence. Aline is passionate about inclusive cities and is an advocate for the deliberately oppressed, especially children and youth. Aline today will discuss how urban inequities are putting the 8th sector to the test, especially in contested cities such as Beirut, Lebanon. She argues that urban inequities can quickly translate into conflict, rendering urban spaces as violent and risky. Such inequities are presenting an enigma to the aid industry. And within this framework, Aline will discuss her journey with World Vision International and share some of the innovative approaches they have developed to ensure that those who are most marginalized have their needs and their rights met. Last but not least, our third speaker is Samar Saliba, Head of Practice at the Mayor's Migration Council. Samar has over 10 years of experience working on making cities more inclusive of displaced and marginalized people. A Boston son of Lebanese immigrant parents, Samar has a BA in urban studies from Boston University, a Masters of Urban Planning from NYU Wagner School of Public Service and is currently a PhD student at the New School's Milano School of Policy, Management and the Environment. At the Mayor's Migration Council, Samar oversees technical assistance programming that supports city leaders in designing as well as implementing local policies, plans and projects that address the need of refugees and migrants. As the former lead urban advisor at the International Rescue Committee, IRC, Samar worked directly with the cities of Alman, Athens, Milan and Kampala, among others, to institutionalize inclusive projects within city government structures. In today's panel, Samar will speak to the Global Cities Fund for Inclusive Pandemic Response. With a vast majority of reported COVID-19 cases in urban areas, cities today are on the front lines of the global public health crisis. The pandemic presents unique challenges to urban migrants, refugees and internally displaced person due to their legal status, their reliance on the informal employment and economy and their restricted access to public health services and benefits. This initiative will provide direct financial and technical support to five cities that are struggling to implement projects related to public health, livelihoods and inclusive social services. Cities include Beirut, Barranquilla, Freetown, Lima and Mexico City. So in today's panel, Kate, Aline and Samar will come together to share their work across the globe. From India to Lebanon, Tanzania, Mexico and beyond, they will speak to the challenges, opportunities as well as growth urbanists face along the way while working in international organizations. So without further ado, I thought we could start by hearing from Kate, then Aline and Samar about current projects that they're working on, the accomplishments they were able to secure to fight urban inequities despite all circumstances. So with that, Kate, if you're ready, I'll hand it over to you. Thanks, guys. Thank you for having me. It's pretty amazing to get to be on a panel with such other distinguished practitioners. It's so often that I'm in a place where I'm talking about theory. So it's so nice today. We're going to try to talk about what actually happens and can you actually do anything? I'm, that's when I become a little bit theoretical and academic and I'm not sure I've accomplished as much as I want to in my career. But without further ado, let me, I can't help myself. I said earlier, it's kind of a career hazard for me. I always have slides. Sometimes I think my oops, I think I share the wrong one. Hold on. I think I should share the right screen with you guys. Sorry. So working on becoming a professional. Okay. Can you see, are you guys seeing the main screen or do you see my notes? Main screen? Okay, great. All right. So I just wanted to start with the first project I really ever worked on, which was with the World Bank. So just to give you a background on myself and kind of how I got here, I worked in undergrad in public housing in Chicago as the plan for transformation was happening. So public housing was coming down pretty quickly and getting redeveloped. And kids were scattering all over the city. And it was a pretty big time in housing in Chicago. And I got pretty fascinated with it. And when I got out of college, there weren't a lot of jobs. And so I found myself, believe it or not, at the World Bank. And it was this opportunity to look at the same exact issues I'd seen in Chicago, but with whole different dimensions of problems, right? With, you know, attempt the resources a hundred times faster urban growth, right? All these things were wild. And I got a chance to work with the lead housing advisor for the World Bank. And one of the projects that I got super involved in and has is one that's never ended in my career. I'm always coming back to Ethiopia. And I like to say, it's a guilty, it's guilty for me because what's happened to Addis, I like to say happened on my watch. I've been here the whole time. But I'm going to tell you how I think we went wrong and kind of how things are changing. So these, this map is redeveloping Cabello housing in Ethiopia. So what they what happened is this, you see the pic, the image on the top, the kind of traditional housing in Ethiopian cities was state owned. And they decided they were going to raise all of it and create high rise public housing, which is the thing down below. So the exact opposite of the direction Chicago was going where it was coming from. And the red dots are like one of my first maps. I had to like dig this out from 2004. I was like, how am I going to frame this? And basically, they were just tore down all of inner Addis, and I bring this all up because we didn't think sustainably about it. The city wasn't thinking sustainably about it. I wasn't thinking sustainably about it. I was like a very card carrying economist from University of Chicago. And I believed that, you know, we could get private markets to redevelop this, the city would function better. And it was Addis at the time was a beautiful walkable city in Africa. You don't see a lot of those often they're sprawling. And it was safe. And now Addis has some really big roads that are beautiful. And they have an LRT, but you can't walk across Addis anymore. And the housing is all of the people have to, the housing is now on the outskirts. So they now have the problems that Chicago had when I first got there. So I've been trying to reflect and I bring this all up because again, I kind of ended up at international institutions without meaning to. So with that in mind, and that is like the place I came from, I want to try to explain to you my academic piece here, this has set some ideas about how the network of all of this stuff happens in international space. And the kids, anybody who took my class this semester, sorry, you've seen this, but I feel like it's something, it took me 20 years of practice to figure out. So I like to say this kind of a super complex network of actors and the very center of all of this urban work are local and national governments. Often local governments are undermined, they're under resourced, resourced like financially and then people like the number of people or hours, never ideas. And I just want to like put that at the center. And then the first kind of intergroup for me, and I think we'll hear some really cool stories from this space a bit today, as that you have kind of NGOs and advocacy groups. And I bring all this up because I'm thinking about where you guys could work if you want to be in this space. These are all possibilities, right? There's actually a lot of possibilities in this space. So there's NGOs, there's advocacy groups that have a particular angle, right? You're going to hear from some of those today that are thinking about specific issues. Then you have the academy and think tanks. You guys are in the academy now at Columbia where a lot of ideas are being tested and some of the monitoring and evaluation that in the West might be done by local governments is going to be done by the academy. Some of the, and I think of this as like idea generation. So these green dots are the idea generation in the space. And then we have money. So this is where I think the money comes in. So like turquoise dots are the people who are taking, the ideas are coming from the academy, the think tanks, the NGOs, there's lots of partnerships between this space and the money. And then all of the money, supposedly some of the money goes into local government and national government. And how much, where, when, whether it should, those are a million questions that are independent on the country context. Turquoise dots are, there's a multi institution. So that's the UN, the World Bank. And then there's bilateral institutions. There's a lot of these, there's a soup of these, there's JICA, the Japanese, there's CEDA, there's NORAD. And I think, you know, you, I was talking to a friend about trying to get mini grids moving in East Africa. And NORAD finances all of this traditional utility infrastructure, but doesn't really get into the space of helping private sector mini grids. And so that space, even though they'll tell you over and over their small amount of money, they influence. And there's, again, a lot of opportunities, a lot of studies that get financed, a lot of individual projects. The EU has a, there's a pea soup for alphabet soup of bilaterals from the EU. And then finally, the foundations. And again, these come closer to, they found more often than not the foundations are funding NGO and think tank money and think tank projects, but often they also have direct involvement with local governments and national governments. And I think I would say in my time in the space, it's moved closer and closer to direct financing local governments. Okay, so that's the network. So now where have I been? I've sort of been all over the map on this. Oh, sorry, the last, the last bubble where I am now, are private consultants. So who makes the projects go? So then there's all these opportunities and you can work for our HR&A does some work. There's AECOM, there's WSP, and there are a lot of them. And they often have an international practice. It's not going to be as robust often as the other ones in the US, or it might be based in another country. And you work directly on projects, you're doing RFP responses. And in this space, you're implementing, right? You're like making the idea that came up from the NGOs and the multilateral decided to finance it, you're making the project happen. So just a lot of different roles. And if you want, I've been trying to like assemble lists. So I can, I can send that out later. I'm like, who are the players? As you try to think about your career. So without further ado, my experience after I left the World Bank, I went and tried to be, you know, private real estate developer, because I believed in enabling markets. And it turns out that was just a lot of money. The financial crisis happened. I went to get my PhD. And then I did a back at the World Bank. It's like a career hazard for me. And I was working, I did my dissertation work in Tanzania and learn Swahili and really had an amazing chance to get to spend a lot of time in, in some of the big cities in Tanzania. And so I found myself working on the additional financing project for, for the BRT in Tanzania. And I bring this one up today because it's the, the goal was to like the initial goal in 2008 of this project was to create a sustainable sense of what, but like sustainable transport project, right? And it's funny because I noticed when I used to say sustainable when I was at the World Bank originally, sustainable meant fiscal sustainability. And most of the projects were not sustainable because they weren't fiscally sustainable. And now I was back at the back and this idea of this, this idea that you all probably understand more of sustainability and green and that linkage started to come into my career. And it was kind of exciting because when I first tried to start talking about like, what is green urbanism back in the day at the bank that had no valence? And now it does. But at the same time, the BRT project, huge crossover runs on the most congested lanes, it took, how long did it take? Jonas, the guy who runs it, the project has been running it for now more than 20 years for the World Bank in Tanzania. I mean, it's, we should call it the Jonas bus rapid transit because without that guy laying down and like making all this happen, negotiating forever. So we had to do an additional financing though, right? So you plan out the project, it's $100 million extra to like actually get the infrastructure moving. And yeah, so that's kind of the context there. What ended up coming, what ended up happening was they actually successfully did it. We got a BRT done in Dar es Salaam. It's pretty cool. There's still a lot of problems with it. I have a lot of misgivings. You know, we put the bus depot in the one area of the city that floods every single year. There's a lot of like fatal infrastructure, bad decision making. But overall, really cool, we got the first phase got done. The cool thing that then happened, there's a lot more funding that's gone into it. The African Development Bank decided to put in to do a loan for the third, secondly line. And then the World Bank did it, which was unexpected. Originally said they wouldn't do it. And now they're doing the third and fourth line of the BRT. So the initial outcomes are like kind of cool. Supposedly it's 90 minutes in time savings round trip. Reality is with unclear impact on households. And there's been a lot of impact studies trying to understand. Did this work? Did it not work? We don't know. So this is, I bring this up because sometimes your goals, if you're at an international multilateral institution, it sounds really cool. It sounds like you're doing the right thing. Often you end up doing a road widening and you end up not exactly knowing if it worked the way you thought it was going to. Because the incentives, the way the multilaterals are set up, you disperse and you move on. Which is fun and exciting for a career, but kind of problematic when we're thinking about what is sustainability. I think in this case I like it because the bank has stayed in it and decided to keep trying to make a full BRT work. The other thing that was kind of that you expect from a BRT, like the big sustainability gain is supposed to be big redevelopment and high density around the BRT. That hasn't happened at all. It's mostly slums around where the first line is. We'll see if it happens in other places. So kind of your urban planning impact. You know you had an impact, but not exactly all of the big sustainability gains you expect to get. Okay. So am I going like way over time? Tell me when I go over time. We have about like maybe five to seven minutes. Five is perfect. Okay. So then the next project is with WRI. So WRI has, I worked at the Ross Center, which is their Sustainable Cities Program. And they have offices in about seven, no about definitely seven countries. And so a lot of this world is about fundraising and trying to advocate for ideas. You can do some advocacy. We were definitely, there was a think tank. So we're doing a lot of hard research trying to advocate, but you can get more directly involved in putting new ideas out there in a way that I couldn't do at the World Bank. I was hemmed in from being able to put a really new idea on the table. And I was still kind of with the way I operated. WRI, I get to work directly with cities at the World Bank. You always go through a ministry. It's kind of exciting. We put together something that I was pretty excited about. Three of my colleagues and I from the one, I ran the DC team. They ran the India and the Mexico team and the three of us together, put together these labs where we wanted to demonstrate that you could do small projects that changed green infrastructure investment in cities. So again, still I'm like further into the being able to try and make a sustainable, sustainable infrastructure possible. We did a ton of research for three years. City Foundation was awesome and funded all this research. I'm not sure anybody's using it, but it was really cool. And we did manage to get from that first thing. We did manage to get the first bike share done in India through this project, through this funding. And now it's, India's amazing because then, you know, you had, we did it in one city and now it's in 60 cities or something, you know, the take up is fast. I mean, things come down fast, but they also go up fast. So pretty exciting. Anyway, so we pulled off this lab where we provided entrepreneurs in wastewater and energy, really specific support and put them in front of a bunch of impact investors. And that managed, we actually managed to get $26 million in seed funding from, I think it was about $200,000 in investment from the lab. So for us, this was pretty exciting. This is a multiple I hadn't seen, even when I'm talking about a $450 million loan with the World Bank, I was spending a lot more than that to get that done, right. And I knew it was going straight to local neighborhoods and it was targeted, it was place-based, it was informal neighborhoods. So, and for my team, we brought in five new funders. So the reality of being in the nonprofit and think tank world this matters. And we get this new narrative, right. And I can bring it to my colleagues at the World Bank. Okay, the last one I'm going to try to do really fast here is what it's like to be working as a private consultant. So now I work with HRNA. I can never seem to get away from international work, even when I try to tell my kids that I'm going to be around more. But so this one, we put together this big strategy for the World Bank to do public real estate, real property asset management, right. So like, like you'll be surprised how few cities actually know all the buildings they own or who's in them or how they lease them. And so there's this big narrative in international development about this missing, this financing gap, like who's going to fill the infrastructure gap. We kind of made this theory and came up with a whole strategy of how the bank could support cities creating their own asset management strategies, right. Like how could they use their own money instead of constantly having to go to central government or the World Bank. And this is a sad story because it was so cool what we did. And I'm like, I was so proud of myself. It felt like I had done my dissertation, but even more important, right, because it was the work was amazing case study, super practical, it was super useful. And the problem, this is the problem with consulting. I handed to my client at the World Bank, and if they do nothing with it, I can't do anything about it. I can tell you guys about it. So there's this, there's a trade-off here with when you're working in the, in the, in the pure kind of public, I mean, private consulting is that you end up in a space where you have to, you have to do what, what your client tells you to do. Okay, so last slide. Am I doing a time for it? Last slide is kind of the big challenges and opportunities I see as someone that's kind of gone across that whole network is that implementing sustainable or inclusive city solutions really depends on where you sit in the network, the scale of it, the type of the project, who your counterpart is, and you as like students and future professionals can think about that and think about where you want to be and be intentional about it. I'm not sure I was. I kind of drifted with the winds. And if I could do it all over, I might be a little more intentional. The projects often take an extremely long time, no matter what anybody says, it's going to be a three-year implementation of a BRT. That's baloney. Everybody at the table knows that's not real. So your, and your outcomes are uncertain, right? Like you don't know that you're going to, because data sucks often, and you don't have, and like politics, this is a political game, right? Urban sustainability and infrastructure at the end of the day depends on the city manager, the mayor, and the national government. And those could change at any moment. So you have this trouble with, you're going to constantly be thinking about coordination, donor fatigue, keeping your donors excited, and then making sure there's some local ownership. So at the end of the day, though, my message is the opportunity to test incredible ideas and implement wild projects is enormous. So for me, I've gotten to do things that are so cool. I feel like I had no business as a girl from Cape Cod getting to do this stuff. So that's it. And I can't wait to hear what everybody else has to say. Thanks. Thank you so much, Kate, for your presentation and sharing your chart and overview of working with international organizations, as well as the concrete examples you've provided and as to where planners can end up working. We will circle back at the end with some questions and time for reflection, as well as some space to allow students to directly ask their questions. But for now, we will hear from Aline, and you are welcome to share your screen. Can you confirm you can see my screen? It's back to, and now it's perfect. Great. Thank you, Maureen. It's difficult to follow what Kate was sharing because the scale that I'm going to talk about is much smaller. But that was very interesting to hear, and I'm looking forward to the discussion section of this call today. Thank you, Maureen, for inviting me. Pleasure to be here today. And it's really a pleasure because mostly when I was a student, this is what I enjoyed most, the sessions and the seminars where practitioners were invited to talk about the real world challenges and what could we do with our academic degree and actual practice. So in the next 10 minutes or so, I'm hoping to share with you a snapshot about my experience navigating the urban world through working in an international non-governmental organization that is focused on children well-being. And that was actually founded on the premise that poverty exists mostly in agricultural areas and on approaches that were intended to work with homogeneous communities that are stable, not moving around much and change happens very slowly. So the journey to bring urban realities to the forefront of World Vision's agenda was really a long and bumpy one. I'm going to give you a snapshot about that today, but I'm excited about the success that is starting to show and I'll share a bit of case studies to show that as well. But let me start with a disclaimer. I'm not an urban planner. I have half a degree in urbanism and I will talk about that in a bit. My academic training as Maureen shared was in public health and focused on community development and this community development bit was the strongest component that linked to my work in urban spaces which started in Beirut in Lebanon. So when I finished my master's degree in public health I joined World Vision as a program officer. I mostly did design, monitoring and evaluation of projects in Beirut. One of those projects aimed at promoting peace-building between youths from Christian and Muslim neighborhoods that were segregated along religious and political lines after the war ended in 1990. And this program was selected as one of the six pilots that World Vision started worldwide with an initiative that was meant to learn about how is urban vulnerability different and how do our models help us either help us address this urban vulnerability and poverty or are hindering us from doing any impact when addressing urban poverty and and issues that children face in cities. So for five years we learned from practice through action and learning and research in Surabaya and Nampen in Siliguri and Kampur in Beirut in Johannesburg and in La Paz. The cities that were part of this initiative were of different sizes, different challenges, different characteristics, but what they all had in common was the 3Ds that you see on the screen, density, diversity and dynamics. For five years we looked at how these 3Ds are influencing our work negatively or positively to establish for example a child-friendly city in Surabaya or to mobilize informal settlement residents in Nampen to advocate for their land rights or for the case of Siliguri and Kampur to address the problem of child labor and child trafficking in Beirut to promote peace building among youth in Soweto in Johannesburg to address youth unemployment issues. And La Paz, Bolivia, it was mostly focused on strengthening community-based disaster risk management and addressing urban violence. So we have learned from this research a lot of things. We've learned mostly what it takes to be effective in urban areas and this is based on the approach that we were using that was mostly a rural focused approach. So we learned that to be effective in cities, first we need to look at the city as a whole, not focused on the neighborhood level where we are very comfortable doing our interventions and mobilization that we do well. We need to intervene at multiple levels. We need to have a focus on contextual issues. World Vision is a very large organization and the focus is really child well-being which is a very broad topic. And in cities we need to focus on one thing, develop capability about it and do it well and become a partner of choice for the government, for other organizations that are working, that will invest in this issue. We learned that partnering is not really optional. If we wanted to reach scale and sustainability we need to work through partners and in collaboration with others. One of the things that Kate just mentioned about assets and the resources that exist at the city level, this is something that's very important to capitalize on. So as international NGO we're usually comfortable with the funding sources that we have from private donations and it really makes us blind to opportunities and resources that exist at the city level that can fund programs. And finally the roles that we play and the skill set that is required from development or humanitarian practitioners in cities are really different from those required from those working in rural areas and more stable contexts and we really need to be agile shifting program focus whenever the context changes and really diversify the skill set at the city level. So in those five years in addition to what we were learning about the urban vulnerability and world vision I was also learning and growing on the personal level. I learned that I was quite quick in moving from my bachelor degree in health promotion to a degree in master's degree in public health. I learned that had I worked for a bit before going for the master's degree in public health I would have changed my mind and pursued something different. So four years into this research I went back to university and I started a master's degree in urbanism. But by the time I was halfway into the courses I was promoted to a regional role for the Middle East and Eastern Europe regional office and I was I had to develop an urban learning hub to share practice among the countries in this region and that role meant that I have more travels and I have less time for my coursework. So I decided that I would finish the courses that I needed to take. I would not do the thesis and that was really one of the compromises I had to make because I thought it would be very helpful for me to understand the theories behind the urbanism and build on the practice that I've been getting from my work with world vision and I'm confident I got what I needed from this degree although I haven't finished it. But I digressed here so going back to world vision and the urban journey five years into this action research and learning topped by another couple of years of engaging with external organizations and partners that were leading on urban issues like UN habitat and others. We launched the book Making Sense of the City which is a compilation of learning from these pilots and this book we launched during Habitat 3 which is the largest UN conference on managing urban areas and human settlements and cities which happens once every 20 years. So that really put world vision on the map of international actors really intentional about looking at cities from the lens of the child and youth well-being mostly and looking at addressing urban poverty and violence in cities. In this book it was the first time we launched the Cities for Children framework that you see here in the middle and this is mostly the programmatic component of a citywide self-sustaining model that we developed. We added other components related to operational aspects. How do we organize ourselves as an organization in the city if we want to leverage on partnerships depending on the size of the city? How do we resource our programs again building on the idea of diversifying funding to build on resources that are actually within the city? And we really spend some time validating this model and implementing offices and in 2020 we started drawing it out across all of World Vision's urban programs and that's part of our scale up plan moving forward to align all existing urban programs with this Cities for Children framework and the citywide self-sustaining model. The model has three components as I shared earlier but it's largely based on the premise that the city is a system. In World Vision we were very comfortable working at this big orange circle here level which was the neighborhood based on the approaches that we had in the past. We realized that if we wanted to make sustainable impact in urban areas we need to connect the interventions that we make at the neighborhood level with policy change at the city level and that means we need to change the way we engage with different actors and this is really an approach that we developed in consultation with urban planners in different offices that we work with. We came up with the citywide approach. I think it's influenced by planning principles to help us see what changes can be made and what type of interventions can we do at neighborhood district, municipality, more regional and national levels and what kind of role can World Vision play at each of those levels to influence policy change for example or to make sure that residents of and informal settlements have access services that they are entitled for and their needs are being met. I'm going to give you three examples very quickly. They won't be examples that are similar to what Kate shared that I'm going to talk about the soft component that we do in the urban sphere in World Vision. So the first example is from our work in Lebanon and I've started again in my career working with the Lebanon office on the peace building project. Since then until now we've shifted and built this program based on learning. We still do a lot of work on social cohesion especially between youth that are coming from different neighborhoods from urban low income neighborhoods that host Lebanese and Syrian refugees and also in Palestinian refugee camps. One of the examples I wanted to share from Lebanon is how we equipped a group of youth to do their own assessment of the built environment of the neighborhood where they are from and identify the issues that they wanted to address and one of the issues was the lack of public space in a very contested and crowded neighborhood in similar field, one of the municipalities of the greater Beirut area. So they conducted their own assessment, they identified priorities and they used that to lobby with the municipality to give them funding to revamp the space that you see here on the left which was wasted land into a sports facility for youth. So they did that, they got the money, they worked with, outsourced some of the work and made it happen and then they got word in the neighborhood that some of the Syrian children are not allowed to go to this neighborhood. So they went back to the municipality and tried to lobby with the municipal board to make sure that this is an area that has access by everyone that lives in the neighborhood regardless of their nationality or where they're coming from. So this is the kind of work that we're doing in this space. I'm going to move to India in my next example and this is an example of a program called Safer City Initiative in New Delhi. The issue that we're trying to address is safety of girls and women and one of the interventions is actually providing self-defense training for girls. What started as a project with 56 girls within a few weeks reached 1000 girls and young women and this was done also in collaboration with one of the religious groups that had a vacant land again that they only use for special occasions and celebrations and we agreed with them that we can use this space to do this training and the training was actually done by the Delhi municipality police department. So they wrote in their staff to conduct this training and once the municipality has seen how effective this training has been they have asked the department of education in the municipality have asked World Vision to replicate this training across 485 schools across the city. So this is an example of how we started from a small initiative targeting 50 something urban residents and we reached a bigger scale by influencing one of the municipal policies. The last example I'm going to give is from Honduras and in Honduras we're actually piloting a new approach for navigating urban fragility through an adaptive management based on scenario planning and continuous context monitoring that can influence the program focus. We work with marginalized groups in hard to reach neighborhoods that have no one working in them no government presence no other NGOs. The only actor that is present in those neighborhoods is the local church and through our connection with this local church we built credibility and trust for World Vision to be able to access these neighborhoods. We work on child protection from violence especially with the issues of gang violence and these neighborhoods. We also work on building youth employability and basically giving them skills to be productive but it's not enough to make them ready for employment what we actually do is we lobby with private sector to allow these youths to be employed in their companies because those youths come from really marginalized and stigmatized neighborhoods and how we influence private sector is by making municipality of San Pedro Sula decrease the taxes for companies that would employ youths from those neighborhoods and really this is another example of how we are linking with different actors and at different levels of the city. I didn't include anything in my presentation on challenges and opportunities I'm hoping we can talk about that during the questions and answers this is all I wanted to share with you thank you. Thank you so much Aileen for sharing your journey with World Vision International with us as well as walking us through your personal journey of working on urban programming initiatives and developing action research and learning that is you know where you can see that it's directly impacting the people that are concerned. One of the main takeaways that I find compelling is this need to connect the change that you're doing on the neighborhood level with planning policies on the city level but we will circle back with you know more questions from everyone and time for reflection but for now we will hear from Salibah who also has some slides to share with us and perhaps even a video. Take it away Salim. Thank you Maureen and thanks Aileen and Kate for great presentations let me just bring this up. Assuming you guys can see this thumbs up great. Yeah thank you again for for inviting me I'm very happy to be here I am a son of Massachusetts of Lebanese immigrant parents so I'm the sort of gateway between Kate and Aileen in a way. I'm also started my career in city planning as a consultant then moved to the International Rescue Committee and I'm now at the Mayor's Migration Council which is the closest I've come to working in a public administration because we're an organization that's led by mayors for mayors so I have a bit of experience in in three different sectors which has sort of shaped my thinking about international work in cities more broadly and more specifically the role that I should and more importantly maybe should not be playing within it so I'll I'll touch on that a little bit but as Maureen mentioned what I want to talk about first and foremost is the Global Cities Fund for Inclusive Pandemic Response which is the Mayor's Migration Council's response to the needs of migrants refugees and internally displaced within cities specifically by supporting the city governments that have that have shown willingness and leadership in supporting them but don't have the resources to do so and Kate I really liked your your network graphic and I took a screenshot of it I have to admit because of all that little connections from this place to this place to this place to this place to this place what we're really trying to do with the Global Cities Fund is demonstrate small model behavior of taking OSF's money and doing just one dotted line directly to the city governments and all the other actors if they want to engage as they should engage as Aline mentioned that's their choice but the the projects that I'm about to present and the process that I'm about to present is really about city leadership in low to middle income countries where cities who are hosting the most migrants and displaced are doing so with the fewest resources so we're trying to address that but I also encourage you all to think about why that is is it just because they're in low to middle income countries or are there greater forces at play within the international development field that's perpetuating that that that that characteristic of of of how cities operate and the resources that they have to to operate so worth noting is that 90% of COVID cases are in urban areas I think that's numbers up to actually 95% perhaps not a surprise given the density of cities and while all people within cities obviously are affected by COVID-19 we've seen even here in New York that the most marginalized within cities are adversely affected by COVID-19 that's the same for not only marginalized communities within New York but also migrants and displaced around the world for some reason Venezuelan refugees in Colombian cities for example have higher COVID-19 case rates than the Colombian population and that sort of speaks to how their vulnerabilities are compounded by ongoing crises that said they're the ones who are working in formal economies they're the ones who have kept working on the front lines have kept cities running and so while they're the most impacted by it they're also perhaps the most important to the response and recovery from COVID-19 I think national governments because of their level of operation have a hard time seeing this but what we've seen is that mayors and city governments are really recognizing the value that migrants and refugees and internally displaced bring and they're starting to or they have stepped up and making sure that they're included in their COVID-19 responses but as I mentioned the resources far exceed their needs far exceed their resources so what we did was set up a rapid response fund of just a million dollars that provided rapid support to city level projects built the capacity of cities and loaded middle-income countries and most importantly perhaps created a proof of concept that you can and should directly fund city governments to do projects and this is important of their design all of this we we receive 30 applications or 26 applications to the global cities fund we had some criteria about what they needed to meet but it was very light touch and it was what are your needs tell us what your needs are and we'll go through a process to figure out how best to fund them ultimately those 26 resulted in these five cities being awarded Beirut, Lebanon, Barranquilla, Colombia, Mexico City, Mexico, Lima, Peru and Freetown Sierra Leone I'll talk about the projects in a little bit but I think more important than these five cities that put forward compelling proposals that our selection committee moved forward more important than us being able to grant these cities to enact these projects is the 21 other applications that we've got that don't have funding and that's really the thing that keeps me up at night personally is why is that right there's clearly need I think too often you see I don't want to call out any names but Bloomberg philanthropies announcing you know competitions for the most innovative projects and grants going to these city governments okay great but what about the the shelter projects or the food distribution projects or the livelihood support projects that aren't groundbreaking but have proven impacts on the cities that implement them but they don't have the resources to do so that's really where the need that we're trying to highlight with with projects such as the Global Cities Fund with that there's I'll go through the projects really quickly they're all on our website but in Kia we'll focus on providing livelihood support to enter the formal market to 100 refugees migrants and internally displaced including internally displaced Colombians and Venezuelan refugees this is fantastic because as you may know the Colombian government just announced a long-term protection status for Venezuelans who arrived in country before January 1st 2021 so they can work formally and really contribute to their city's economy their new city's economy in the case of Venezuelan refugees which is really exciting Beirut will operate the city's first mobile health clinic providing free and non-discriminatory COVID-19 testing to any individual basically it'll go where it is needed most and while we all know especially Elin and I and Maureen about the the challenges of working with Lebanese government and those challenges are certainly real and should be acknowledged working with city governments sometimes you can sort of float beneath beneath that layer the politics as Kate mentioned will always be there they will always be there and one of the reasons why I wanted to move away from the humanitarian sector is to move away from this what I sort of view as a false principle that humanitarians can remain apolitical it's very different to do so in cities especially when you work with city governments who are politically elected and so but if you want to have meaningful impact I think as Kate highlighted nicely you need to you know engage in the politics in a safe respectful and diligent way let me say Lima is opening a comprehensive citizen service platform specifically within one one district of their city where they see a lot of migrants arriving providing comprehensive services we granted them $174,000 they're matching it with $800,000 so it just goes to show what a small amount of funding can actually unlock in terms of cities planning and what they're able to implement. Freetown you'll hear from the mayor in a second so I won't speak about their project too much and then Mexico City will be doing direct cash transfers to 450 migrants refugees and internally displaced which is really important given the sort of impact that COVID-19 prevention measures have had on Mexico City's informal economy which constitutes 50% of their economy and a lot of migrants and internal migrants work within obviously with it along with everybody else within the informal economy of Mexico City so the what I sort of want to highlight from this whole project is that I moved from the IRC to the Mayor's Migration Council because I was advocating to city governments to sorry to country IRC country programs to work with city governments why was there in that middle step really and what and even why why was I there to begin with bringing down you know making connections to the grants etc etc when these cities clearly have ideas of their own but aren't being given the same resources as an IRC or as another international organization I won't name names as agreed with Aline Pire to this call you know which which they they do have and I think the case of Aline you know she really articulated why understanding context why working the partnership is so important but ultimately I think if we're to address urban inequities it starts with the ones that we are perpetuating as international actors and specifically some questions that I want to leave especially those of you who are going into the international urban sphere that you should be asking yourself before you you take that first step you hear so much about localization now even the term localization can be problematic I was joking with a friend in Compolicity Government saying that we really need to localize localization and he often says how local is your local right because there's so much talk about localization what localization means in the humanitarian context is that they committed to having 25 percent of all international funding go directly go to local partners not only is that goal not high enough it hasn't been reached and so it just goes to show you know who's asking about localization where is that localization coming from if it's coming from the international sector can it be inter can it be considered localization who is in the driver's seat you know if you're saying oh we we work with the city government therefore it's local okay but who's behind the wheel you may be both in the car but who's actually driving the car and lastly most importantly are you adding or subtracting and this is something that I struggle with quite a bit you know advising city governments from my apartment in New York am I actually adding to their to their knowledge or am I subtracting and sometimes what that requires is me shutting up and letting somebody like Mayor Aki Sawyer free town speak to speak to you herself about the projects that she's working with and so with the last two minutes of my presentation let me let me stop talking and let Mayor Aki Sawyer carry you through the rest of the way oh wait COVID-19 is an urban challenge that has severely impacted migrants and displaced people living in cities even though they have been a center response our job as mayors is to provide our residents with the tools needed for safe healthy and productive livelihoods but cities needs far exceed their available resources and so we often fall short of the responsibility to protect our most vulnerable residents and miss out on the benefits of an inclusive recovery proven by our response to COVID-19 mayors are resourceful resilient and inclusive leaders in times of crisis but cities around the world need more direct resources from international actors and national governments in order for us to fulfill our potential scale effective solutions and ensure all city residents benefit from our policies and actions I'm a member of the leadership board of the mayor's migration council the MMC is a mayor led resource to all cities that connects them to national regional and international dialogue while working with us to implement inclusive and sustainable migration and displacement policies and practices as part of our work the MMC has recently launched the global cities fund to support city leaders delivering solutions to urgent needs of migrants and displaced people with the support of the global cities fund free town will expand our waste management by helping 240 youth establish 40 sustainable waste management micro enterprises and that in turn provides waste collection services for households across low income informal settlements the project will provide jobs and long-term livelihood for rural migrants improve the city's public health and sanitation and serve those who are most vulnerable we hope cities are recognized as equal government partners we're excited for international partners and national government who work with us not around us and hopeful that our future collaboration will help cities emerge as dynamic centers of opportunity for all so thanks for listening I think uh the last thing that I just want to repeat what mayor Akisoria said was we need to work with cities not around cities and that's really important if you're getting into the international urban development space thank you thank you very much samar for your for presenting your work at the mayor's migration council and the you know showing us the valuable impact of the initiative and on on five cities that that are very much struggling in silence I would say with the impact of COVID-19 I also want to thank you for giving us your critical and very honest view on how you role as a planner in humanitarian organizations versus other sectors like the public sector or the private sector can have very different impacts and I feel like it's very important to be aware of that um so I would love to hear from our participants you are welcome to turn on your cameras you are you know just a quick reminder if you'd like to ask questions directly to our panelists today you may either raise your hand and I can call on you to you know speak directly or you could type your question in the chat box we do have a few questions in the chat box already but we will start with you know conversation to keep it animated and then when when people don't have any questions anymore we'll go to addressing the questions in the chat if if no one has any questions yet to warm up I'm wondering if the speakers have questions for each other I do Kate I have a question for you I'm just curious about one of the things that we're working on at the mayor's migration council is really not just funding cities directly but influencing funding two cities directly and the financing mechanisms around that and I'm curious and you talked a little bit about the bank's work in Dar as a BRT and I'm curious and I've seen it and it's it's a beautiful it's a beautiful project so well done but I'm curious if um if you have any thoughts about these types of projects you know sort of moving away from funding for infrastructure for growth um as cities like Dar and Kampala and I start to urbanize and urbanize and urbanize but really focus more on infrastructure for distribution and focus more on social projects that maybe don't look as good or as shiny on a slide but um maybe more in line with uh some of the lean the projects that Aline presented that world vision is doing and if there's a connection that could be made there yeah so it's a good question so the bank the big bank projects are infrastructure projects right and they're still because of urban growth there's an unmeasurable amount of demand for the infrastructure projects I would say um and governments like it right so because we're always talking about politics they love a ribbon cutting and I can't I mean every time I go to Dar some somebody's giving somebody a tour of Dar um but the bank does have some like the CDD the community development model um that they have um has worked pretty well and I think but so my problem is I think you need a world vision partner and the world bank doesn't know how to partner with the with the with world vision well enough right like I would love to know like have you I mean when I was at WRI I thought we would be able to partner with the bank to do our work because we what I loved about that the world bank model I mean the WRI model was all of our staff were local so we didn't have international staff in our in our local offices which is very different than the world bank and it was kind of add like people that were advocating for green cities that were Mexican that are Turkish and that was important and I thought oh wouldn't it be powerful if we could get world bank funding to do our work and it's nearly impossible to get the money out because it's going through central governments right so you always so the big IFIs and the big bilaterals their finance ministers are making convert or come conversing so I I have struggled to find like how can you underwrite it how can you convince a mayor you know um I think some of the work you were doing at IRC trying to show that like the refugees are in the humanitarian sector needs to think about cities that's important like I don't I don't think that you know in my career the work both of you have done at the beginning wasn't even on the table like it was controversial to talk about mortgages for low-income people when I first got started in this space and now the world bank is I mean the project I thought about talking about but it's not far enough along the bank in Dar the new project they're going to try to do some land reclamation to put a park in that's never been done or never been done right like why public space we're planners public space is like the most one of the most important things to livelihood and happiness and every like to living in a city you need public space right I'm at hRNA we like deeply believe in this and you know the international space it's just coming up you know I know Bloomberg's problematic but the work the road safety stuff talking about designing cities for pedestrians which most poor people are pedestrians like that's radical we were thinking about sidewalks you know I mean why every world bank project that puts a road in doesn't have a side doesn't do complete streets you know why isn't there always a sidewalk and a bike path I don't know that's a simple way to get that change and it doesn't happen so um yeah I think I thought it was a really long-winded answer um I don't know if that causes any other questions out there in the world no I think that's that's really helpful and it is like you know there's uh the at the new school my my director is Mike Cohen who developed the bank's urban policy over the 80s and the 90s and he has amazing yeah great and anyway he he and I had a long conversation about this and you know he said you know the bank has built all the easy roads in Kenya which I I think is the problem with urban portfolio yeah because it's easier to expand a road than what what does Dar need Dar has 10% of the city has has any type of improved sanitation number one issue let's fix the sanitation problem do you know how hard that is that's a 20 year investment trying to get into everybody's little neighborhood and get everybody I mean Kampala's done some amazing work on this like Kampala's way ahead of everybody else but getting the bank to finance that that's hard you know and getting the local government willing to say yeah like the national government and the local government being like yeah I want to go into the informal settlements and fix the sanitation problem it's not glamorous you know they're not interested in I wrote this down the the public real property asset management strategy I'm certainly interested in it and I know that the cities that we work with certainly be interested in it to sort of like we'll send it to you no please it's a sort of wean themselves offer some much problematic financing mechanisms to actually do the work that they want to do with their own yeah and it's a it's a spectrum right like we should be thinking of it as spectrum and often municipal finances is is stepwise right and everybody's trying to like sorry to cut everybody off trying to work towards bonds and bond financing isn't a reality for 99.99% of cities but there's a lot of other local resources that you could think about so I mean I don't know if you're listening I have a question that is in the chat that pertains to all three of you and it you know it tackles all of your journey is coming from very different places and working in different in different places so for someone who's interested in pursuing NGO or a multilateral institution and work institutional work such as you know working for the UN or World Bank but are coming from a private planning slash consultant background how do you make the move how do you make the shift and I know some are used to work at WSP and then you shift to IRC and I was like show me the ropes how does this work so I'm sure a lot of like it's a little bit opaque as to how you can enter this this this world many of these places are large institutions that are taught to get a foot through and many positions require prior experience in the public sector so Krithika's question is how do you break the barrier um yeah with dumb luck uh I think uh it's funny I tell this story a lot but I think it's important especially with what Kate just said when I was I found out I didn't know that the IRC existed but I was in my Wagner masters program with somebody who's the head of Sean Penn's core response and doing fantastic work now and Lee she she was getting she was in the humanitarian sector and getting her degree in planning because the humanitarian world was becoming more urban and so we were sort of crossing paths and she said you know there's this job at the IRC you might be interested in it I said what's the IRC and the IRC had just put out a policy statement saying that the international humanitarian community needs to work with city planners they also put out a job description saying um we're hiring for an urban response learning manager must have five years experience in the humanitarian sector and so I applied and I put both documents in front of them and I said well I don't have this but I have this and are you about what you're saying the humanitarian community should do are you saying that I should have five years of experience and I think that sort of triggered something in their mind which is sort of like why why was that in our job description to begin with what kind of experience actually is valuable if if you're entering that space and I think if you're moving from the consulting world into the NGO world which is exactly what I did I think you have to make the case yourself and and look for opportunities you know if the opportunity isn't there it may be that you need to create it and it takes a lot of time to understand how these these organizations are working where they're working what quote-unquote urban projects they have going on but I think again as to what Kate mentioned like the space is opening up and there are more opportunities but you have to make the case for yourself as urbanists entering into humanitarian spaces about why that experience is valuable and I think more and more that case is becoming easier to make. Yeah I would add to that overview by some building on your point that the opportunity is there so really right now it's one of the great moments to enter the sphere because there are on the one hand we are increasingly seeing humanitarian needs in urban areas so there's an increase in urban warfare there's an increase in urban violence and conflicts and more and more we're seeing that poverty is increasing in urban areas and the urban poverty for a child for example who is growing in a poor urban neighborhood they are doing much worse than their peers in rural contexts and in more and better off communities and urban areas so if we look at this whole urban world not only from the planning perspective but as a context the need is increasing but also the opportunities are increasing because in 2015-16 there was there were two key moments the first one was the creation of the new urban agenda during Habitat 3 conference which sets the agenda for the next 20 years for organizations that are working in the urban sphere it tells donors where to put this money and for the first time sorry that was in 2016 in 2015 for the first time a global goal on urban was created in the sustainable development goals and that was the goal 11 and there's really more intentional focus by governments and member states in the UN about looking at cities and the issues in cities and for the first time ever we're seeing for example UNICEF has urban strategy and their focus on children so there are really opportunities Haiti earthquake 10 years more than 10 years ago put the urban focus as a priority because humanitarians didn't have that planning thinking when doing their humanitarian work it was mostly the soft and the direct development and the direct aid that we used to give on the on finding the spot for entry or an entry point I haven't done a shift from another sector so I've always worked in the humanitarian and development sector but what I know is that we are increasingly in demand for planners to help us understand in our urban strategies and in countries where we operate for example to help us understand the landscape that would help us build city strategies and who to connect with and what actual interventions do we want to plan also at the global level there are so many opportunities for short consultancies that urban planners can do for NGOs and UN agencies so that would be a good entry point to accumulate some experience from these short consultancies at city level or globally that could allow an understanding of this sector and the actors that are in it and could be an entry point for this field thank you so much both Samar and Aline I just wanted to okay sorry I just want to say that we're out of time however we could stop the recording and if some students have a little bit more time to hang around with us we you can ask your questions directly to the speakers so let me conclude and we will end and then we will we can stay on informally which is how we used to do it in the real world but unfortunately zoom world is slightly different so I want to thank all of you on behalf of GSAP and the urban planning program in particular for presenting today we really appreciate you taking the time and I think the audience will agree that this was an illuminating discussion though there's still so much to be said we will be on spring break next week so please make sure to join us two weeks from now on Tuesday March 9th at the same time for our next lips which will be with Nisha Bochway thank you again all for coming and I hope everyone has a great day