Summary

Cities and local governments are a source of ideas and approaches to help the world reach the Goals of the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development (2030 Agenda). Cities also demonstrate how the tenets of the New Urban Agenda (NUA) can be implemented with creativity, efficient use of resources, and broad community support. 

This report showcases how local governments are demonstrating how impactful urban innovation can be and how important it is to engage cities as partners in efforts to implement the New Urban Agenda. This report is meant to be read alongside the 2022 Quadrennial Report. It highlights shortlisted and award-winning finalists from the last two cycles of the Guangzhou Award (2018, 2020) that are also part of the Best Practice Database on the Urban Agenda Platform. These initiatives have been selected to illustrate how cities and regions are attending to the three transformative commitments of the NUA, and how a focus on changes in governance, planning and financing practices take ideas and turn them into action and transformative change. This report also harvests cases from every region of the world, demonstrating how no one region or country has a monopoly on innovation.