City boundaries generally are set along administrative or legal lines. ![]() In the absence of a universally agreed definition of city, policymakers typically rely on guidelines that vary by country. These include things such as access to public transport and air quality. Many indicators for SDG 11 - the "urban goal" - are highly sensitive to where city boundaries are drawn. "When you go down to targets and indicators, you will clearly see that there are quite a number of indicators for which the unit of measurement is the city," said Robert Ndugwa, head of U.N.-Habitat’s Global Urban Observatory Unit. "The challenge here is if we don’t agree globally on what the city definition is, we’re going to have a situation where when you measure such indicators, you might … measure them in an area which is perhaps a municipality or the core part of the city, but not necessarily the whole city extent." The issue underpins the 169 targets and their related indicators included in the SDG framework. In the eyes of many working on the issue, a universal definition of the city that can be used by policymakers and the global development community is a piece of the SDGs puzzle that is still missing. The meeting is a pivotal step toward ironing out a globally applicable city definition that can be used to measure progress on the Sustainable Development Goals, particularly those that pertain to cities, along with the New Urban Agenda, a global agreement that will guide urbanization over the next 20 years. ![]() This month, urban thinkers from the United Nations, the European Commission and other organizations are meeting in Brussels to continue a curiously complex attempt: developing a universal definition of the "city."
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