GCRO at the World Urban Forum 13
GCRO Executive Director Rashid Seedat and Junior Researcher Shannon Whitaker attended the 13th session of the biennial World Urban Forum (WUF13), held in Baku, Azerbaijan from 17 to 22 May 2026. Convened by UN-Habitat under the theme Housing the World: Safe and Resilient Cities and Communities, WUF13 was the largest session in the Forum's 24-year history, drawing over 58,000 registered participants from 176 countries, including ministers, mayors, urban planners, civil society organisations and academia. For the first time in the Forum's history, a dedicated Leaders Summit, organised at the initiative of the host country, brought together 27 heads of state and government, alongside more than 150 ministers and over 130 mayors.
Seedat participated in four sessions across the six-day programme. On 19 May, he joined the press conference launching the Barcelona Metropolitan Declaration: Metropolitan Future Beyond 2030, adopted at the World Metropolitan Summit in Barcelona in October 2025. Seedat's contribution drew on the GCRO's expertise in collecting and analysing urban data to support evidence-based policymaking and urban planning. His participation also reflects the GCRO's leadership in the African Governance and Infrastructure Network (AGaIN), which developed an African position paper that was presented at the Summit and integrated into the Declaration.
On 21 May, Seedat participated in the session Housing Data as Public Infrastructure: Improving Housing Affordability through DIGIPIN, convened by India's National Institute of Urban Affairs and the Department of Posts. He drew on the GCRO's Quality of Life Survey to speak on how spatially analysed data can support service delivery.
On the final day of the Forum, Seedat participated in two further sessions. He co-hosted a networking event, Metropolitan Governance for Affordable Housing and Inclusive Territorial Development, alongside the National Front of Mayors (Brazil), the Àrea Metropolitana de Barcelona (AMB), and the Ministry of Cities of Brazil, drawing on the GCRO's AGaIN work to present African metropolitan governance realities in comparative perspective. He also joined the high-level SDG 11 Progress Review and 50 Years of Urban Development: Towards Inclusive, Resilient and Data-Driven Cities panel discussion, convened by UN-Habitat, where he spoke to the challenges of producing disaggregated, policy-relevant urban data that addresses our most pressing challenges, like climate change, as well as the conditions needed to make these data systems useful to local and metropolitan decision-makers.
Beyond the formal programme, WUF13 provided a valuable platform for strengthening the GCRO's relationships with key international partners. On the sidelines of the Forum, Seedat and Whitaker participated in knowledge exchange engagements through GUO-Net, the UN-Habitat Global Urban Observatory Network, of which Seedat serves as Vice Chairperson of the Steering Committee. In one such engagement, GCRO engaged with the Georgian Spatial and Urban Development Agency, which is working toward establishing an urban observatory and sought guidance on institutional design. A parallel meeting with Ms Khadijetou Hamed, Head of the Cooperation Unit at the Nouakchott Region in Mauritania, offered similar guidance on building a sustainable urban observatory.
WUF13 concluded with the adoption of the Baku Call to Action, a collective commitment by governments, cities, civil society and international organisations to address the global housing crisis. The document frames housing as a system – linking homes with land, infrastructure, services and economic opportunity – and calls for integrated, people-centred solutions that treat housing and climate justice as inseparable. Its outcomes will feed directly into the UN General Assembly High-Level Meeting on the midterm review of the New Urban Agenda, scheduled for New York in July 2026.