Rashid Seedat says cities in Global North and South face new structural changes

Data on housing and urban development is becoming a key tool for the formation of effective housing policy, stated Rashid Seedat, Executive Director of the Gauteng City-Region Observatory, during the adoption of the Barcelona Metropolitan Declaration on "Bold Commitments to Addressing the Housing Crisis at the Agglomeration Level" within the framework of WUF13 in Baku, Report informs.

"Data on housing and urban development is becoming a key tool for the formation of effective housing policy, but today it remains fragmented and often inconsistent across different systems," he said.

According to him, in the context of the rapid growth of megacities and megaregions around the world, the need for more accurate and comparable data on urban development is increasing.

"Today, cities of the Global North and South are facing the formation of new urban structures, including megacities and complex agglomerations, which require more advanced governance tools," he noted.

Seedat emphasized that one of the main problems remains the fragmentation and inconsistency of data on housing, infrastructure, population, and the socio-economic development of cities, as they are collected by different organizations without a unified standard.

He added that in many cases, such data either becomes outdated or has low accuracy, which reduces its practical value for policy and planning.