The Sustainable Cities Consultation, a partnership between UN-Habitat and Colab, have launched an innovative online platform that will allow citizens of 5,570 cities in Brazil to provide feedback on the current state of their city. The results will help guide local authorities and decision makers to create public policies to respond to challenges of urbanisation in an efficient and integrated way, from the perspective of the city inhabitants.

In Brazil, almost 85 per cent of people live in cities. The Sustainable Cities and Communities survey (Cidades e Comunidades Sustentáveis in Portuguese), is a platform which serves as a transparency tool for citizens to provide substantive feedback for government municipalities, for the development of future policy implementation. The survey will consist of 29 questions relating to indicators in Sustainable Development Goal 11 (SDG11), used to compare citizens’ perception of the current state of the city versus two years ago. The questionnaire was based on feedback and recommendations from public consultations held with eight municipalities in Brazil by Colab, along with recommendations from UN-Habitat.

“It is fundamental to listen to the population and capture their ideas about how their city is evolving towards SDG11 and allow more accurate and collective analysis of the reality of Brazilian cities,” said Claudio Acioly, Head of Capacity Development Unit of UN-Habitat.

The results of the surveys will be cross referenced with official data from Brazilian institutions, such as IBGE and international institutions, to monitor the performance of Brazilian cities in relation to SDG11 and other SDGs. The results will be published  in 2019.

Colab is a citizen-to-government engagement platform that offers a social network for citizens, focused on issue reporting, urban improvement suggestions and public services evaluations, as well as participation in the decision-making process.

“Citizens’ collaboration and transparency are the best tools to improve public management,” said Gustavo Maia, CEO and co-founder of Colab. “The technology ensures that the dialogue with the population happens quickly and efficiently, and allows the results of this conversation to be measured, which facilitates the evaluation of public managers.”

All are invited to participate in the survey, which is open until 24 December 2018. Please visit www.colab.re or download Colab’s application.

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For more information please contact Claudio Acioly,  Capacity Development Unit Director, UN-Habitat – claudio.acioly(@)un.org.

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