The United Nations Human Settlements Programme (UN-Habitat) and the Municipality of Shanghai co-hosted the SDG Cities Global Conference October 29-31, in coordination with World Cities Day.
The conference brought together practitioners from around the world in a global forum to explore the possibilities for cities to advance the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) for one billion people by 2030.
Josh Yates, founder and CEO of Thriving Cities Group, introduced a partnership between Thriving Cities and UN-Habitat to build an enterprise marketplace to attract sustainable social investment that can generate progress on key markers of economic, environmental, and public health development in 1,000 cities around the world.
Yates told the gathering that an accelerated collaboration among “cities, city networks, development banks, civil society groups, academics and thought leaders” would be required to “reach the scale of action that is required to leverage the transformative potential of cities to advance the achievement of the SDGs.”
To achieve these goals, Yates said, Thriving Cities has assembled a “cross-sector, multi-disciplinary, and multinational taskforce of thought and practice leaders with decades of experience and expertise in the areas of community development, movement building, legacy creation, strategic design and delivery, and social investing.”
Thriving Cities is ready to come alongside UN-Habitat and all those committed to the cause of the SDGs to work together to grow investment for the good of cities across the globe.