I am going to participate in the tenth World Urban Forum, in Abu Dhabi 8-13 February 2020.

The Commonwealth Association of Planners has announced the winners of its Young Planners essay competition. The topics addressed by the winners were how to plan for better care of an aging population, and the nature of place-making.

A conference at the University of Birmingham on 22 March on "Planning Challenges in the Commonwealth" will be the venue for the UK launch of the book "Leading Change"

Following the World Urban Forum in Barcelona in 2004, I was invited to write a short article for the UN-Habitat publication Habitat Debate. Many of the themes I introduced have now been taken forward in the International Guidelines for Urban and Territorial Planning (2015) and in the New Urban Agenda (2016).

The 2006 World Urban Forum was a significant step on the road to creating a New Urban Agenda. Here is my first hand account from July 2006 of how we went about re-inventing planning.

Earlier this week I was honoured to receive the OBE for services to planning, at an investiture at Buckingham Palace.

The Habitat 3 conference in Quito this month is a critical opportunity to shape the practice of planning globally.

The national professional body representing planners across Canada, the Canadian Institute of Planners, is facing an existential crisis. Its future is on a knife edge.

What are the issues that planners across the globe are grappling with? This week I attended a meeting in London of the Commonwealth Association of Planners (CAP). Representatives from Africa, the Caribbean and Americas, Asia, Australasia and the Pacific, and Europe gave fascinating presentations. In the space of an hour we were given a kaleidoscope of planners’ work and concerns – from post-earthquake Christchurch to crime and sprawl in Caribbean islands, from the “jobs and growth” agenda in Europe to the forced removal of people to make way for major infrastructure projects in dynamic African countries. Where does planning go from here?

What are the implications of moves to offer international accreditation of planning education, particularly on North-South basis globally? The RTPI has fully accredited a planning programme in Africa for the first time. I chaired the Accreditation Board that visited University of Cape Town last week. On 30 October the Commonwealth Association of Planners will hold a meeting in London that will consider how to build capacity and institutions for planning across the Commonwealth. The following day I will be part of a video-link panel to the annual conference of the American Collegiate Schools of Planning in Cincinnati, where the theme of the panel will be international accreditation.