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"

The recent World Urban Forum was an opportunity to show UK engagement with urbanisation as a global issue. It was missed.

Today at the World Urban Forum in Kuala Lumpur I went into three events, which spanned a wide range of themes and places.Each in its own way provoked thoughts.

The ninth World Urban Forum opens on 7 February 2018, and I am here in Kuala Lumpur and will be reporting on it on this website and on other social media.

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.

How can cities in the rapidly urbanising world benefit from Smart City approaches to urban management?

A simple grid plan for urban extensions should be the basis for managing rapid urbanisation says a new UN-Habitat report.

Twenty years ago I became RTPI President. Here is the text of the speech I gave to RTPI Council on my inauguration. It ends by reaffirming the manifesto published in 1975 by the Radical Institute Group, of which I was one of the founders.

Around 8 million live in Afghanistan's cities today, but that number is expected to double by 2030.Yet, like many other rapidly urbanising countries, it has no national urban policy, no housing policy, and local planning is weak.