NEWS

         

This week, we celebrated a campaign that is in the DNA of Metropolis: Metropolitan Day, an initiative promoted by the Cities Program of CIPPEC (Center for the Implementation of Public Policies for Equity and Growth) in collaboration with Metropolis, the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB), GIZ, MetroHub, University of Guadalajara and Politecnico di Milano. The campaign honors the date of the Montréal Declaration on Metropolitan Areas (October 7, 2015) and this year has been promoted through events held in Buenos Aires, Guadalajara, Monterrey, Montréal, Porto Alegre, Quito, Rosario, San Salvador and Tijuana.

The Montréal Declaration on Metropolitan Areas has been key to the inclusion of the metropolitan approach in the New Urban Agenda, one of humanity's main roadmaps for building a future "in which all people enjoy equal rights and access to the benefits and opportunities that cities can offer". "With the conviction that we need a metropolitan perspective to achieve this ideal, we did not hesitate to adhere to Metropolitan Day on a global scale. We want to encourage in-depth reflection on the phenomenon of metropolization, and bring together a whole range of institutions to find common responses to the challenges it poses," said Octavi de la Varga, Secretary General of Metropolis.

The main idea of Metropolitan Day has been to organize, from 1 to 7 October 2018, a one-day event to bring together local leaders active in different metropolitan territories of the world in order to develop an open space to discuss urgent issues they face as metropolitan communities and to reinforce the importance of metropolitan governance on the international agenda. It is an opportunity to give visibility to all host local governments on the global metropolitan agenda and to strengthen relationships between international metropolitan peers, as well as to share common problems and learn more about good metropolitan governance practices.

Of all our members, Buenos Aires, Guadalajara, Monterrey, Montréal, Porto Alegre, Quito, Rosario, San Salvador, and Tijuana have been the scene during these days of dialogues between a diversity of actors in their respective metropolitan territories. Our Secretary General has traveled to Quito and Tijuana, where the date has been used to bring together various events and thus enrich the debates and diversity of participants

In the case of Quito, in addition to Metropolitan Day, the Habitat III + 2 international meeting and the first meeting of the "Surplus Food Network" pilot project were held from 1 to 3 October. The aim of the project is to exchange experiences on how to reduce food waste while strengthening the provision of services and broadening citizen participation.

Tijuana took the opportunity to celebrate on October 3 the first meeting of the pilot project "Metropolis in motion", whose main objective is to identify the key elements of a metropolitan mobility strategy that integrates the components of inclusion, accessibility and sustainability. The following day, the City Council of Tijuana invited the mayors of Tecate and San Diego to exchange the daily dilemmas they face: "Here there is not only a metropolitan area at work, but a bi-national metropolitan area," said Juan Manuel Gastelum, Mayor of Tijuana.

The next Metropolitan Day celebrations should take place between 7 and 13 October 2019. It is expected that in the next editions of the campaign, more metropolises in the world will be added, taking advantage of the celebrations of the Urban October and thus reinforcing the importance of metropolitan governance in the global agendas.