Ministers, mayors, international organisations, urban planners and experts are in Baku, Azerbaijan, to tackle one of the world’s fastest-growing challenges: the global housing crisis, which, according to the United Nations, affects nearly 2.8 billion people worldwide.

How can cities be made safer and more resilient, and how can housing be made more affordable? These are the questions under discussion at the thirteenth session of the World Urban Forum (WUF13), which opened on Sunday.

Over the past decade, many countries have made visible progress: around 160 countries have already adopted or are developing national urban policies, while more than two-thirds of countries have introduced housing affordability programmes.

However, according to the UN Human Settlements Programme (UN-Habitat), these efforts remain insufficient. More than 1.1 billion people live in slums or informal settlements worldwide, and more than 120 million people over the last decade were either born into or moved into slums and informal settlements.

Solutions such as expanded social housing programmes, improvements to informal settlements and protection for vulnerable populations were discussed during the opening sessions of the week-long event. 

Special attention was given to countries recovering from war and destruction. Bashar Al Sebaai, mayor of Homs, Syria, which suffered extensive damage during years of conflict, says that the city urgently needs not only ideas and expertise, but also financing to restore basic services and infrastructure.

“400,000 returned to the city after the war,” he told UN News. “They came back to severely damaged neighbourhoods. Solid waste, infrastructure, electricity…it’s very hard to find solution to all these problems.”

The millions living in unsafe housing are among the first to suffer from floods, heatwaves and other extreme events that are being made worse as a result of the man-made climate crisis.

The construction sector remains one of the world’s largest sources of greenhouse gas emissions, and low-carbon construction, resilient urban planning and climate-sensitive upgrading of informal settlements are on the agenda.

The first day of the forum itself was marked by prolonged heavy rain in Baku, forcing city authorities to take urgent measures to drain flooded roads. Local residents noted that such weather events were rare in Azerbaijan just a few years ago, especially at this time of year.

“When we have a homeless population of hundreds of thousands of people in the streets in the United States, and we’re considered to be wealthy…In New York, it looks like a crisis right now,” Lance Jay Brown, the founder of the Consortium for Sustainable Urbanization, told UN News.

Mr. Brown noted that, during his lifetime, the world’s population has nearly quadrupled, while affordable housing for low-income communities has become increasingly difficult to secure.

The US-based architect expressed hope that the discussions and decisions emerging from Baku would help generate practical solutions to the global housing crisis.

UN News is in Baku covering the Summit throughout the week. Follow along here.