The World Urban Forum is the principal international gathering on the urban future, convened biennially by UN-Habitat since 2002. It is a non-legislative forum: no treaty leaves Baku or Cairo, no binding resolution is adopted. What does happen is that ministries, city governments, academics, civil society organisations, professional bodies and the private sector spend a week in the same building reading from the same agenda, currently the New Urban Agenda adopted at Habitat III in Quito in 2016. The forum is where the global vocabulary of urban policy is consolidated, contested, and exported back into national and municipal practice. To work in spatial planning today is to work, knowingly or not, in the vocabulary the WUF helps to stabilise.

That vocabulary is not neutral. It currently centres on resilience, innovation, smart urbanism, sustainable development, and the localisation of the SDGs. These terms, however, can absorb a great deal of injustice without registering it. A city can be resilient, smart and sustainable on the metrics the forum tracks while remaining steeply unequal in housing access, voice in planning processes, and recognition of who counts as a legitimate urban resident. The Centre’s argument, made through everything we bring to the WUF, is that the vocabulary needs to be reorganised around a strong normative justice argument as its analytical centre.

The Centre approaches each WUF with three operational instruments, and the pages that follow document each instrument as it has been used across five editions. First, we run training events: structured workshop sessions, two to three hours long, in which the analytical tools of the Spatial Justice Package are put into the hands of participants who arrive from city governments, NGOs and university programmes. The Slum Upgrading Game in Abu Dhabi, the Empowering Cities for the Just Transition event in Cairo, and the Networking Event in Baku are the most developed examples. Training events are the Centre’s preferred pedagogical instrument because they translate concepts into practice within a single afternoon.

Second, we convene networking events that bring our collaborators into direct conversation with city officials and other universities. These are not panels but working sessions, designed to produce specific outputs: a shared diagnosis, a list of priorities, a draft framework. The Sustainable Development & Urban Resilience event at WUF 10 and the CJC Networking Event at WUF 13 sit in this register.

Third, we contribute to substantive sessions organised by UN-Habitat itself and by partner consortia: the Universities Round Table, the WUF Academy Campus, the Resilient Cities tracks led by Arup and others, the Union for the Mediterranean’s housing dialogues. In these, we bring the Spatial Justice Conceptual Model and the SJ Benchmarking Tool into discussions that would otherwise be conducted in the dominant vocabulary alone. The function is corrective rather than evangelical: not to replace the agenda but to insist on the justice questions inside it.

We do not pretend the forum is where urban policy is made. It is, however, the place where the people who make it meet the people who think about it, and the Centre’s strategy across five editions has been calibrated to that.

Read across, the five WUFs trace the formation of an instrument. What arrived at Kuala Lumpur in 2018 was a position: a claim that justice belonged at the analytical centre of the urban agenda. What left Baku in 2026 was a working apparatus: a Conceptual Model with nine operational components, a Planning Cycle, a Benchmarking Tool with citizen and policy-maker versions, a Handbook, a workshop kit. Three things made this trajectory possible.

Training events as preferred pedagogy. From the Slum Upgrading Game at Abu Dhabi to the Empowering Cities Training Event at Cairo to the Networking Event at Baku, the Centre has invested consistently in workshop-format engagement. Lectures are easier to organise but harder to translate into practice; the Training Event format has been our way of insisting that the Package becomes operational within the duration of a single session.

Partners who have stayed. The Universities Network and Universities Round Table convened by UN-Habitat have been a continuous interlocutor. The Union for the Mediterranean joined at Abu Dhabi and has remained, leading to the Housing as a Public Good lecture at Baku. The Resilient Cities Network and Arup have collaborated across resilience tracks at multiple editions. The London School of Economics and the International Institute for Environment and Development came on board for the Baku Networking Event. None of these are flag-flying partnerships; they are working ones, with shared outputs.

An expanding regional reach. The editions themselves moved across regions, from Southeast Asia to the Gulf to Eastern Europe to North Africa to the South Caucasus. The Centre’s contributions have tracked the regional questions raised at each edition without losing the analytical line. Informal settlements were central at Abu Dhabi and remained central at Baku, but the way they were discussed shifted: from a question of upgrading to a question of housing as system.