Regional Observatories
After the approval of the global record for the second Habitat agenda by the General Assembly of the United Nations, all contributing countries invited to join the Habitat conference held in Istanbul in 1996 were directed towards the importance of establishing national and local urban observatories, and an invitation was sent to all the governments of these countries to continue working on improving the production of indicators to measure the performance of the continuous urban development of the cities. Because of that the international experiences in finding urban observatories are considered comparatively new.
The global urban observatory , in the United Nation's center for human settlements in Nairobi, aims at helping the governments, the local administrations and the urban communities in the fields of collecting, managing, analyzing and producing the urban observatories and that is by establishing national and local urban observatories. These can contribute in preparing an active developmental urban policy, and help officials in understanding social, economic, structural, demographic and environmental interactions inside cities as well as using that knowledge in preparing active urban developmental plans.
Many countries reacted and started establishing urban observatories, some on a national level, and some on a city level especially big cities. In what follows a number of international experiences regarding the establishing of an urban observatory, whether in foreign or Arab countries, will be presented. These examples differ in many aspects, perhaps the most important are the continuity and the ability to perform the main task assigned to an observatory which is helping officials and decision makers responsible for local development.
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Experiments in the Arab world
- The local urban observatory in Al-Madinah city
- The Egyptian experiment
- The Jordanian experiment
- The Experiment of the Kingdom of Bahrain
- The experiment of Sudan
What is an Urban Observatory?
