Understanding cities and their role in sustainable development

The role of cities in unravelling the intricacies to enable the world to understand sustainable development will be discussed in Melbourne on Tuesday night by Aromar Revi.

Aromar Revi speaking on TEDx.

The Co-chair of the UN Sustainable Development Solutions Network and the Director of the Indian Institute for Human Settlements will speak in the Swanston Room, Melbourne Town Hall for 90 minutes from 6:00pm.

Those unable to be at the Tuesday night session can hear a discussion between Mr Revi and Monash University’s Professor John Twaites, who is the Chair of ClimateWorks Australia and the Monash Sustainability Institute, on Radio National about 2:00pm that day.

Mr Revi has served as a senior advisor to various ministries of the Government of India, consulted with a wide range of UN, multilateral, bilateral development and private sector institutions and works on economic, environmental and social change at global, regional and urban scales.

He was responsible for the development of housing and urban development plans for two-thirds of India’s states in the 1990s and worked on three of the world’s ten largest cities, with communities across twenty-five of India’s twenty-eight states.

Mr Revi is a global expert on Sustainable Urban development; has helped mobilise a successful international campaign for an urban SDG as part of the UN’s post-2015 development agenda, which brought major global urban institutions (UN-Habitat, UCLG, C-40, ICLEI, Metropolis, WUC, SDI and WEIGO) and over 200 cities and organisations together.

He is considered a leading expert on Global Environmental Change, especially on Climate Change adaptation and mitigation having coordinated the Urban Areas section of the IPCC 5th Assessment report (2014).

This event is presented by Sustainable Development Solutions Network Australia/Pacific and Monash Sustainability Institute.

Mr Revi appeared at a TEDx event last year where he talked about how much of the world's population will soon live in mega-cities.

He suggests these are often seen as a problem when in fact they hold the key to a sustainable future if their resources are adequately managed and their energy harnessed for the common good.

Watch his TEDx talk – “Cities can save us”.