Cities Are Listening Updates

The UCLG Town Hall Process in a nutshell

The UCLG Town Hall is the space where internationally organized civil society and the municipal movement meet, dialogue, and co-create for a better shared future. This takes shape in the form of a process of continued structured dialogue which informs the policy of the world organization, of local and regional governments and of global policy processes.

The 2022 UCLG Town Hall strengthens this structured dialogue with the presence of international partners, and three cross-cutting caucuses: Youth, Feminism and Accessibility ensuring that throughout all Town Hall deliberations, no one and no place is left behind. The topics of the Town Hall are intimately linked to UCLG's Pact for the Future and its three axes: People, Planet and Government.

2022 is the year to rethink how these three components interact in the aftermath of the multi-faceted shock brought about by the pandemic and the topics identified for the Town Hall process reflect that. The topics also reflect the proposed way forward of the UN Secretary General’s Common Agenda which looks at the next 25 years and tries to imagine a more inclusive and networked multilateral system. They cover ways to rethink the Global Commons, Trust and Government, Caring Systems and Climate and Culture.

Bringing all the Town Halls together

This year’s Town Hall process is all about working towards better common future by exploring how to regain trust in government, redefine our institutions, and shape the public services of the future while developing brand-new paradigms on what must be part of the global commons and what constitutes caring systems. Altogether, within the framework of a climate emergency that we need to integrate as a core element of our social behaviour.

But we don’t want to stop there. The All Town Halls meeting aims to put forward cross-cutting topics spotted during the first phase of the 2022. From the role of the media in the appearance of alternative narratives and the need for a truth revolution, to the revision of long-standing shared fights such as putting care at the center to re-purpose our pledges to influence global agendas.

Headlines from the Future

We live in a time of political polarization and worsening cultural division. We can no longer agree on what is true. And yet, the one thing to which virtually everyone subscribes is that the news we receive is biased. Much of the backlash is not against the events themselves but the way in which they are presented and framed. Such a state of mind now extends to mainstream institutions, from the government to the entire political spectrum, and the official truth that they represent. It is not only that truth is contested; lying does not seem to be wrong anymore. This poses a fundamental challenge to living together in an inclusive and sustainable way - and to our common future.

But the future is there to be built. The news headlines of tomorrow are the political choices that we build together and the debates we choose to face today. How to bring truth back to the center, and the role that the media has to play for that to happen, is one of these debates.