A very warm welcome to all of you to the 6th annual World Cities Summit (WCS) Mayors Forum.
First, allow me to say a very big Thank You to Mayor de Blasio and his team of committed city officials for hosting this Forum in vibrant, energetic and cosmopolitan New York, and thank you once again for extending to all of us such a warm welcome. I also want to thank Deputy Secretary-General of the United Nations, Mr Jan Eliasson, for agreeing to deliver a special address at the session, and all our speakers around the world who would be sharing with us illuminating discussions and presentations of topics of interest to cities.
Since it started in Singapore in 2010, the Forum has become an important platform for many of the world’s mayors and city leaders. What do we hope to achieve at this Forum? At its core, we should continue to discuss urban challenges that are common to most of our cities, share our ideas and experiences with one other, and identify or develop innovative and practical solutions that can make our cities more sustainable, more equitable and more liveable. And we should not only talk about pressing issues that confront us today, but also anticipate tomorrow’s challenges and opportunities.
Today, we have more than 60 mayors and city leaders from all over the world gathered here, representing various stages of city development, and bringing to this Forum a diverse range of experiences. In fact, more than half of you are joining us for the first time. A special welcome to all of you. Leaders of international organisations will also share their insights into issues of sustainable development and urban governance. It is precisely the diversity of the cities and organisations represented here that gives this Forum its strength. For instance, the difficulties that an older, more developed city faces today, could well be the challenges that a newer city will have to confront tomorrow, while the more-established cities may find refreshing and out-of-the-box ideas from the newer cities. In short, we should learn, keep learning, and never stop learning from one another.
By connecting public, private and people sectors across boundaries and across regions, the Mayors Forum also gives city leaders like you the opportunity to network, cooperate and collaborate on issues of urban governance. For instance, Fundacion Metropoli, a non-profit organisation based in Spain, is now working with Findeter, the Colombian National Development Bank, on several projects in Latin America after they met and connected at the 2013 Mayors Forum. And I’m confident that in the white spaces that we’ve provided for in this Forum, you will be actively seeking out potential partners with the information, the expertise and the experience to help you solve some of the problems that you have been thinking about for a while.
At the international level, I am also happy to note that a key contribution of last year’s Mayors Forum is a letter advocating a UN Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) focused on Cities. This letter was submitted to the United Nations Open Working Group on Sustainable Development Goals last year. You may be pleased to know that Goal 11 – which is to “Make Cities and Human settlements inclusive, safe, resilient and sustainable” – has been maintained in the current draft. These SDGs will be formally adopted at the UN Sustainable Development Summit in September this year right here in New York City, which will be attended by most Heads of State or Heads of Government. This is recognition of local and city authorities as key collaborators for sustainable urban development.
This is the second time that the WCS Mayors Forum is being held outside Singapore. The first time was in the city of Bilbao, Spain, in 2013, where we discussed various issues in the context of a diverse European region, and recognised the role of strong leadership in the midst of rapid urbanisation. First, leaders need to align the work of their governments with drivers of positive change around the world. Second, leaders must inspire and energise their people, and mobilise their resources and finances effectively, to realise their visions for their cities. Third, leaders have to address problems of corruption, dysfunctional governance and crime, which blight cities. These points underlined the case for strong city leadership and were indeed valuable and instructive.
Needless to say, we are very delighted to hold the WCS Mayors Forum here in New York City this year. New York won the Lee Kuan Yew World City Prize in 2012. Holding the Forum here provides us an opportunity to be fully immersed in, and inspired by New York’s ability to constantly re-invent and out-do itself. It also provides us a meaningful and valuable reference point to focus our discussions about urban challenges and solutions.
Urbanisation (the growth of cities), Globalisation (the growing interconnectedness and interdependency of countries, cities and peoples), and the explosion of the Information Age (such as the growth of smart data and the power of data analytics): increasingly intertwined, the confluence of these three forces has had, and will continue to have, a tremendous impact on societies around the world. As city leaders, we need to be prepared, be flexible and adaptive enough to capitalise on these forces to benefit our people. The theme for this year’s Forum, ‘“Liveable and Sustainable Cities: Innovative Cities of Opportunity”, is therefore appropriate as it focuses on the issues as much as it searches for effective and innovative solutions and opportunities.
For those of us who may be new to this platform, the structure of the Mayors Forum is built around a series of interactive, moderated discussions. Every one of us will have the opportunity to actively participate in these discussions, and explore approaches to addressing the challenges of creating opportunities for all. This year, our focus will be on issues relating to:
The WCS Young Leaders Symposium, held earlier this morning, had also discussed how to create equal opportunities for all, on the topics mentioned earlier. The Young Leaders are also here taking part in this Mayors Forum and we look forward to you adding your voice and your perspective to our discussions.
Singapore, which is one of the few sovereign city-states in the world, owes much of what we are today to the courage, energy and determination of our founding fathers, such as Mr Lee Kuan Yew, Dr Goh Keng Swee, Dr S Rajaratnam and other members of the founding team. They turned vulnerability into strength, and harnessed our will to survive to create opportunity for our people to make a living. But a small island merely 718 sq km in size, with no hinterland and no resources other than our people, would not have lasted 50 years had it been built only on the strength of individual personalities. Instead, our pioneers had the foresight to create lasting institutions, which we benefited from today, cultivated leadership continuity and succession, educated our young, and imbued values such as integrity, meritocracy, multiracialism, a zero tolerance for corruption, and so on.
As many of you would know, our founding Prime Minister, Mr Lee Kuan Yew, passed away earlier this year. We thank our host for graciously proposing that a tribute be made to the late Mr Lee, whose ideas have transformed Singapore and whose thinking still serves as an invaluable guide for our future. We will later be screening a short video, entitled “City Made from the Sky”, and narrated by the late Mr Lee. The original and longer version was produced in 2010 for the Shanghai World Expo. It describes Singapore’s urban transformation.
We have quite an ambitious agenda for this Mayors Forum, but one which I believe will yield enriching discussion and valuable insights, anchored upon the commitment we all share to make our cities better and more liveable for our people. I am confident that like past years, our continued passion for sustainable urban development will generate more ideas and urban solutions during our Forum sessions today and tomorrow.
I wish everyone a very fruitful, meaning and valuable discussion.