Who Speaks for the Urban? Addressing the Urban Science-Policy Interface

Notes from the 13th World Urban Forum in Baku

May 19, 2026

Dr. Deen Sharp, LSE

At the 13^th World Urban Forum (WUF) in Baku, Urban Studies Journal convened a small, deliberately informal session in the WUF sponsored Academy “Schoolyard” under the title Who Speaks for the Urban? Addressing the Urban Science–Policy Interface. This session kicked off a series of convenings on the “Future of Multilateralism for the Urban” for the Urban Studies Journal’s upcoming special issue on the Future of Urban Studies. The next convening will be in-person at the London School of Economics on July 6, followed by another at the University of Bristol in November. There will also be two online convenings by the end of the year.

The hour-long conversation at WUF 13 took stock of a peculiar absence of such an interface and asked what, if anything, should be done about it. Unlike climate change, biodiversity, or food security, the urban has no permanent, intergovernmental body that produces regular, authoritative assessments of the field. There is no “IPCC for cities.” And yet an urban science–policy interface plainly exists. It is simply dispersed: across UN-Habitat’s normative work, the World Urban Forum itself, city networks such as ICLEI and C40, foundation-funded research, and academic publishing. The framing remarks set out this fragmented landscape and stressed the constraint that shadows any conversation about new institutions. With the multilateral system under acute financial and political pressure, and the UN itself contracting, there is little appetite and little room for new bodies or mechanisms. The question is therefore not only what an urban interface should look like in the abstract, but what is buildable at all.

Why does the absence matter? Because evidence and research are not an optional supplement to urban policy but the very basis on which it can be done well. Research underpins the case for funding. It is what allows findings to be translated into policy in the first place. It informs the inevitable trade-offs that urban decisions require, and, just as importantly, it can take account of those trade-offs rather than leave them buried. It tests the assumptions on which policy rests, and it generates new ideas. In climate, biodiversity, and food security, this evidentiary function has been given institutional form. In the urban, it has not. That is the real problem the session set out to address.

From there the discussion took up the harder problem beneath the framing: whether the urban can be spoken for at all in a single voice. The participants in the room came at the question from markedly different vantage points, one working on urban security, another on urban health, another on displacement, and it quickly became clear that each field carries distinct evidentiary needs and policy rhythms. What counts as relevant knowledge, and on what timescale it is needed, differs sharply across the things we group under “the urban.” This pluralism was named directly as both the strength and the central difficulty of the endeavour. It is a strength because the urban draws genuine analytical power from these many angles; it is a difficulty because it is not obvious that they can be assessed, or spoken for, through any single mechanism. A climate assessment can, with effort, converge on shared physical referents. The urban resists that kind of convergence, because it is less a domain than a bundle of overlapping domains held together by a word.

This fed naturally into a recurring theme of the hour, the limits of transferring the IPCC model. The appeal of the IPCC is obvious, but several contributors cautioned that the urban presents a fundamentally different kind of challenge. Climate science assesses a relatively bounded body of physical evidence; urban knowledge is heterogeneous, normatively loaded, and constituted as much by contestation over what the problem is as by measurement of it. A mechanism built for consensus around shared facts may be poorly suited to a field whose facts are themselves in dispute. It was here that an alternative reference point was introduced, less familiar to most in the room but one that drew evident interest: the High Level Panel of Experts on Food Security and Nutrition (HLPE-FSN) model in the food security domain, a smaller and more deliberative expert panel embedded within an intergovernmental committee rather than a large standing assessment body. The discussion did not pursue it in depth but it served to open up the design space beyond the IPCC and to suggest that the urban interface need not be imagined at IPCC scale to be useful.

If the first half of the conversation concerned the supply of urban knowledge, the second half turned to its reception. A participant working on urban health raised what may be the most fundamental difficulty of all: governments frequently do not listen to advice, however authoritative its source. The problem is not principally a shortage of evidence or even of mechanisms to produce it, but one of trust and legitimacy.

The final intervention pressed this point into its political economy. A contributor noted that the financial interests bound up in urban land and real estate make the urban policy terrain unusually difficult for science to enter. One must also ask who bears the costs of taking urban evidence seriously, and who has an interest in ensuring it is never produced. If the session concentrated on the production and reception of urban knowledge, there was a third axis that was also touched upon: the relations of engagement between those who produce research and those who use it. In some research settings, scholars are expected to communicate beyond the academy and to render their work in plain terms but not everyone has the institutional support or cover to do so.

In the session, no consensus was sought and none emerged through the session. The case for an urban science–policy interface is yet to be coherently articulated, and the comparators from other domains, the IPCC and IPBES at scale, the smaller and more deliberative HLPE-FSN model, offer not a template to copy but a set of trade-offs to reason through. As Agenda 2030 approaches its horizon and the New Urban Agenda reaches its mid-point, the question the session posed remains open, and usefully so: who speaks for the urban, how, on whose authority?