On November 5, 2014, African Centre for Cities will co-host The Kapuscinski Development Lecture in Cape Town in a joint initiative with the European Commission, the United Nations Development Programme, and the University of Cape Town.

To be delivered by Aromar Revi, Director of the Indian Institute of Human Settlements (IIHS), the lecture, titled “Putting the Urban at the Heart of the 2030 Sustainable Development Goals” comes at a time when the Millennium Development Goals set to expire and need to be replaced with a new set of globally applicable and locally implementable Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) for 2030. Climate Change negotiations are stalled and need a more determined and pragmatic approach if run-away impacts are to be avoided. It is clear that a different economic, social and human development path must be established to ensure greater sustainability and inclusion of all citizens into productive economic life and well-being. Cities and regions across the world provide the opportunity to do this. Africa and Asia are at the centre of the urban, social and economic transitions that the world will witness over the next two decades. It is important that we see political imaginations and leadership from these geographies that address local, regional and global themes.

The Kapuscinski Development Lectures are a series of high-level lectures focused on development-related issues organized jointly by the United Nations Development Programme, the European Community and leading universities and think-tanks. There have been over 50 lectures by top development thinkers since 2009. The lectures honour Ryszard Kapuscinski, the celebrated Polish writer and journalist who covered developing countries. Past lectures have been delivered by, among others, Aung San Suu Kyi, Ashraf Ghani, Jagdish Bhagwati, Helen Clark, Jan Pronk, Jeffrey Sachs, José Antonio Ocampo, Kamal Dervis, Mark Malloch-Brown, Michelle Bachelet and Paul Collier.

Aromar Revi is Director of the Indian Institute for Human Settlements (IIHS) India’s prospective independent national University for Research & Innovation addressing its challenges of urbanisation. He has been a senior advisor to various ministries of the Government of India, and has consulted for a wide range of UN, multilateral, bilateral development and private sector institutions. He is a member of the Leadership Council of the UN Sustainable Development Solutions Network (SDSN), co-chair of its urban thematic group, and a Fellow of the India China Institute at the New School, New York. A global expert on sustainable urban development, he has co-led a successful international campaign for an urban Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) as part of the UN’s post-2015 development agenda, which brought the major global urban institutions and over 200 cities and institutions together. He has led over 100 major research, consulting and implementation assignments in India and abroad. He has helped structure, design and review development investments in excess of $8 billion, including housing and urban development plans for two-thirds of India’s 29 states in the 1990s. Besides being part of multiple international projects in 6 countries, he has worked on 3 of the world’s 10 largest cities, and with communities across 25 Indian states. A leading expert on Global Environmental Change especially on Climate Change adaptation and mitigation, he is one of the Coordinating Lead Authors for the Urban Areas section of the IPCC 5th Assessment report (2014), and co-PI of an international Climate Adaptation research programme than spans India and Africa. He is one of South Asia’s leading disaster mitigation and management experts and has led emergency teams to assess, plan and execute recovery and rehabilitation programmes for 10 major earthquake, cyclone, surge and flood events affecting over 5 million people, and serves on the Advisory Board of the UNISDR Scientific & Technical Advisory Group and its Global Assessment of Risk.

The event will take place at Lecture Hall 3B in the New Snape Building on UCT’s Upper Campus.
Limited seating will be available and RSVP is essential in order to attend. The lecture will be streamed live and commences at 6:00pm.
All attendees should be seated by 5:45pm.

RSVP maryam.waglay@uct.ac.za using subject line “Kapuscinski Development Lecture”