The Current Column

Sustainable urban development

The World Urban Forum: A global stage for authoritarian urbanism?

Goedeking, Nicholas / Michael Roll / Lena Gutheil
The Current Column (2026)

Bonn: German Institute of Development and Sustainability (IDOS), The Current Column of 11 May 2026

Bonn, 11 May 2026. The prominence of authoritarian planning approaches at the World Urban Forum is increasing the risk that UN-Habitat’s flagship conference is becoming a global stage for autocrats.

From 17 to 22 May, the 13th World Urban Forum (WUF) will take place in Baku, Azerbaijan. For the second time in a row and the third time since 2020, an authoritarian state will host UN-Habitat’s flagship conference on urban development. As Germany and other democracies scale back their presence at the forum, the visibility of authoritarian states is increasing. If this trend persists, the conference risks becoming a global stage for authoritarian urbanism.

The last WUF in 2024 served as a case in point. Held in Cairo, the Egyptian host government used the event’s global media and policy attention to promote its controversial New Administrative Capital: a multi-billion-dollar master-planned city that has been heavily criticised for mainly catering to the wealthy, remaining largely uninhabited, and crowding out investment in Egypt’s existing cities. The magazine The Economist poignantly called the project “Egypt's new pyramid scheme”.

There is no shortage of urgent urban challenges demanding new development approaches. The African continent is urbanising at an unprecedented rate, projected to double its urban population from 700 million in 2020 to 1.4 billion in 2050. Globally, approximately 1 billion people still live in informal settlements, often with insufficient access to clean water and sanitation. Urban areas account for over 70 per cent of global greenhouse gas emissions, rendering them indispensable for climate mitigation.

Yet, the planning approach favoured by many autocracies – and prominently on display at their WUF pavilions – to tackle these urban challenges often fails, principally because it is not designed to benefit the majority of their citizens. Rather, the approach, which the political scientist James Scott famously termed “authoritarian high modernism”, usually mainly serves regime interests and fantasies, such as entrenching political power and exerting social control. As an ideology, it privileges top-down master plans that prioritise state-led, coercive social engineering disconnected from people’s lived realities.

Apart from strengthening authoritarian regimes, history shows that this planning approach often exacerbates rather than solves urban problems. It tends to waste vast public and private resources, and often results in massive social and environmental damage. Prominent examples of authoritarian high modernism gone wrong include master-planned “new cities”, such as Malaysia’s “Forest City”, Saudi Arabia’s “The Line”, and Abu Dhabi’s failed eco-city “Masdar City”. By some estimates, two thirds of these new city projects remain nearly empty or completely uninhabited, resulting in “ghost cities”. Projects like these primarily benefit political elites, special interests, and investors – not citizens, their urban needs, and their human rights.

Alternative urban development models that prioritise urban upgrading rather than master plans, citizen inclusion rather than elite exclusivity, and residents’ needs rather than regime interests, are often less visually captivating. However, these more pluralist planning approaches frequently not only work better but are also essential for reducing urban inequality, including in informal settlements.

Presenting pluralist approaches to urban development at conferences such as WUF therefore matters. Thousands of policymakers, investors, journalists, and civil society representatives come together at such events to survey, discuss, and envision urban development pathways. At the last WUF in Cairo, Germany’s pavilion provided an important island of democratic discourse amidst a sea of autocratic blueprints. The pavilion was designed as a public forum, and brought together diverse perspectives and logics and facilitated inclusive discussions.

This year in Baku, however, there will be no German pavilion. Other democracies are also facing cuts to their development programmes and scaling back their presence at the conference. The absence of these pavilions and meeting spaces will represent lost opportunities for exposing WUF participants from around the world to more democratic, pluralistic, and sustainable urban development pathways.

Obviously, the urban visions presented at the pavilions will only be one dimension of the event. But if Germany and other democracies are serious about supporting partners to address urgent urban challenges in a fiscally responsible and effective way, they cannot opt out of the global competition of envisioning the cities of tomorrow. Germany should therefore consider organising a pavilion at the next WUF in Mexico City in 2028 and, together with its democratic partners, explore options for disrupting the authoritarian trend, including hosting a future forum itself.