The State of the Cities: Why, and how, the Commonwealth must address the challenge of sustainable urbanisation

The Commonwealth embraces all dimensions of today’s urban challenges. Its ranks include global cities such as Mumbai with its 19 million inhabitants, and Malé, which with a
population of just 111,000 is the largest city in the rapidly urbanising small island state of Maldives, threatened by rising sea levels.What happens in our fast expanding cities in this generation will shape the future of the Commonwealth. That is why the Kampala Communiqué from the 2007 Commonwealth People’s Forum (CPF), building on the
workshop run by Built Environment Professions in the Commonwealth (BEPIC), called on Commonwealth member states and the Commonwealth Consultative Group on Human Settlements (CCGHS) to prepare a report on the state of Commonwealth cities. This paper provides a summary of the key findings of ComHabitat’s forthcoming report, ‘The Commonwealth’s Urban Challenge: Scoping the State of the Commonwealth Cities’.