Habitat: United Nations Conference on Human Settlements,
The United Nations convened the Habitat: United
Nations Conference on Human Settlements in Vancouver, Canada, from 31 May till
11 June 1976 as governments began to recognise the consequences of rapid
urbanisation, especially in the developing world. That pioneering conference
sprung from warnings about urbanisation at the 1972 United Nations Conference
on the Human Environment in Stockholm convened to deal with the perceived
threat to the environment by human activity.
At the time of the first Habitat conference in
Vancouver in 1976, urbanization and its impacts were barely on the radar screen
of a United Nations created just three decades earlier when two-thirds of
humanity was still rural. But the world was starting to witness the greatest
and fastest migration into cities and towns in history. In 1976, one-third of
the world’s people lived in cities. Just 30 years later, this rose to one-half
and will continue to grow to two-thirds, or 6 billion people, by 2050. Cities
are now home to half of humankind.
On 16
December 1976 the General Assembly adopted resolution 31/109 which took note of
the report of the conference, the Vancouver Declaration on Human Settlements.
The resolution called upon all organizations within and outside the UN system
to support national efforts in the formulation, design, implementation and
evaluation of projects to improve human settlements.
Outcome of the Conference was the establishment of
UN-HABITAT, the UN organization for human settlements. In 1996 a second
conference was held, Habitat II, in Istanbul, Turkey.
Links
The website of UN-Habitat, United Nations Human Settlement
Programme.
Text of
the Vancouver Declaration on Human Settlements.
Stamp catalogue
Tunisia
last revised: