Urban Indicators Project (Completed)

In 2001 a City Development Strategy (CDS) exercise was carried out in the Changsha City-Region (CZT) comprising the cities of Changsha, Zhuzhou, and Xiangtan (Hunan Province), Giuyang (Guizhou Province), and Shengyan (Liaoning Province) with funding support from the Cities Alliance. The primary purpose of CDS was to enable the cities to develop a broad-based vision of growth and poverty reduction through improved governance. A follow-up project was designed to develop indicators for the continuous monitoring of the CDS-generated goals, strategies and programs. The project therefore required the cities to identify and develop indicators and apply these in the decision making process.

Each project city developed a set of 88 indicators and collected necessary data in a broad-based consultative manner. A final project workshop was held in Guiyang in early November, which was sponsored UN-HABITAT, the Ministry of Construction and the City Government of Guiyang. Sixty-seven experts from 14 cities, two international agencies, central ministries, and universities attended the two-day workshop. In spite of initial hiccup in the launching of the project, majority of the participating cities expressed their desire to launch indicators program in their cities. Under the aegis of the project, UN-HABITAT Indicators Toolkit was translated into Chinese, so were the entire project reports. These reports are posted on the UN-HABITAT Beijing Information Office homepage.