Commonwealth Sustainable Cities Coalition (CSCC) pilot

The CSCC’s origins lie in the Commonwealth Declaration on Sustainable Urbanisation, adopted at CHOGM 2022 in Rwanda, which recognised the importance of inclusive, low-carbon and well-governed cities across the Commonwealth. In response to the Declaration, a dialogue was convened at Wilton Park with support from the UK Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office (FCDO), bringing together governments, professional bodies and practitioners to examine what coordinated action on sustainable urbanisation across the Commonwealth could look like.

The consensus reached at that meeting was the catalyst for the pilot that followed. From it, the Commonwealth Sustainable Cities Initiative (CSCI) was established, a coalition of Commonwealth professional associations and institutions formed to translate the Declaration’s ambitions into coordinated action on the ground.

At its heart, the CSCC is built on a single conviction: that the nature and scale of the urban challenges facing Commonwealth cities cannot be addressed by any one sector, discipline or level of government working alone. Only by bringing together a multi-level, multi-sector, cross-disciplinary coalition, connecting national and subnational governments, professional bodies, academia, civil society and the private sector, can we hope to achieve the systemic change that is needed.

The CSCC therefore operates through four interconnected Action Groups, each focused on a dimension of the urban challenge where fragmentation and misalignment are most acute: Housing Systems, Integrated Planning, Urban Finance, and Skills and Competencies. These are not parallel workstreams , the coalition’s central insight is that it is at the intersections between systems that the greatest obstacles lie, and where coordinated action offers the greatest leverage.

A pilot phase engaged governments, practitioners and communities across member states in Africa, Asia, the Americas and the Asia-Pacific, with a major multi-stakeholder dialogue held in Bhopal, Madhya Pradesh, India.

The Commonwealth Association of Architects is a founding member of the CSCC and led the Housing Systems Action Group throughout the pilot. Architecture sits at the intersection of the Coalition’s four themes: architects shape the built environment, navigate planning systems, work within finance constraints, and carry both the skills and the professional responsibility to help cities adapt.

The CAA’s leadership of the Housing Action Group reflects a conviction that the built environment professions must be active participants, not observers, in addressing the urban crises of our time. Its findings are the subject of a dedicated page; a summary is included below.

The pilot produced findings with implications for policy, practice and professional development across the Commonwealth:

• Housing Action Group: Across Commonwealth cities, housing delivery is dominated by informal and incremental processes, yet policy remains focused on formal supply, leaving the majority of residents outside the reach of support.
• Integrated Planning: Spatial plans are routinely disconnected from infrastructure investment and delivery mechanisms, limiting their ability to shape real urban outcomes and producing cities that are costly and difficult to retrofit.
• Urban Finance: Cities frequently lack the fiscal tools, data and institutional frameworks to attract and deploy the investment needed, even when need is clear and political will exists.
• Skills & Competencies: Capacity gaps among built environment professionals, and the absence of shared frameworks across disciplines, remain a critical and underacknowledged constraint on urban development outcomes.

Taken together, the findings point to a single underlying condition: urban systems are fragmented, misaligned, and operating well below their collective potential.

Follow this link for further information on the findings and outputs from the pilot, and this link to listen to a recording of the closing meeting, that was opened with remarks from the Commonwealth Secretary General, the Hon Shirley Botchwey, and closed with remarks from the Rwandan High Commissioner, HE Johnston Busingye.