2026 World Cities Report: What the World Urban Forum Revealed About Cities’ Future
- May 19
- 4 min read
Presented at UN-Habitat’s World Urban Forum (WUF13) in Baku, the 2026 World Cities Report warns that the global housing crisis is becoming one of the defining challenges of modern urbanisation.
At the World Urban Forum in Baku, UN-Habitat unveiled its 2026 World Cities Report with the sort of statistic that lands like a thunderclap: 3.4bn people now lack access to adequate housing. In a world of rising towers and swelling property wealth, the basic act of securing a decent home has become, for billions, an increasingly distant aspiration.
The report, titled The Global Housing Crisis: Pathways to Action, is less a technical assessment than an indictment of contemporary urbanisation. Benedict Arima, the UN-Habitat research chief who led the report, described housing failure as
“a multidimensional problem with persistent gaps in policy and implementation.”
Its diagnosis is grim. Globally, 44% of households now spend more than 30% of their income on housing. In sub-Saharan Africa, the figure rises to 55%. House prices have outpaced incomes almost everywhere; a typical home now costs more than 11 times annual household earnings worldwide, and over 16 times in parts of Asia.
Yet the report avoids the simplistic conclusion that the world merely needs more homes.
“The solution is to build,” Mr Arima conceded, before adding the caveat that has haunted planners from China to California: “we have to build the right kind of houses.”
Entire districts of speculative housing have emerged as “ghost cities”—financial assets masquerading as communities.
The report’s most striking insight is that housing can no longer be understood simply as shelter. It is now inseparable from climate vulnerability, migration, inequality and finance. By 2024, 203.2m people had been forcibly displaced, double the figure a decade ago. Climate-related disasters are projected to destroy 167m homes by 2040. Informal housing already accounts for 80% of residential construction in developing countries.
And still the world’s financial architecture remains ill-suited to the crisis. Only one-quarter of eligible applicants globally succeed in obtaining housing loans. The rest are left to improvise, often through informal borrowing or self-built settlements.
Anaclàudia Rossbach, executive director of UN-Habitat, argued that the crisis has escaped the traditional boundaries of development economics.
“Affordability,” she observed, “has always been an issue for the Global South… now becoming an issue in the Global North.”
Young professionals in London, pensioners in Seoul and migrant workers in Lagos increasingly face variations of the same predicament: wages cannot keep pace with urban land values.
Her sharpest warning concerned informality.
“One billion people live in informal settlements,” she said. “Informality has gained a dimension that no longer can be tolerated.”
Such settlements are often treated by governments as temporary aberrations rather than permanent components of urban growth. Yet they are now among the defining features of twenty-first-century cities.
The report insists that bulldozers and eviction campaigns are not solutions. Instead, Ms Rossbach called for recognising and integrating informal settlements “into urban plans, into the city structure and into the investment policies of the country.” In effect, the argument is radical precisely because it is pragmatic: cities must adapt to the realities their residents have already created.
Perhaps the report’s most subtle contribution is its challenge to the ideology that has governed housing policy for decades.
“We need to strengthen the social function of housing while harnessing its economic value,” Mr Arima argued.
That balancing act has proved elusive. Governments have long treated homes simultaneously as social goods and engines of wealth accumulation. The contradiction has inflated asset prices while hollowing out affordability.
Ms Rossbach put the matter even more bluntly:
“Housing is very expensive and people don’t have the money to pay.”
It is a startlingly simple sentence for such a sprawling global dilemma, but perhaps that is precisely the point. Beneath the jargon of resilience frameworks and financing instruments lies a basic failure of political economy.
The report nevertheless retains a cautious optimism. Its subtitle—Pathways to Action—was, Ms Rossbach noted, chosen deliberately.
“Yes, let’s bring the crisis because it’s relevant to bring the crisis,” she said, “but let’s show the pathways.”
Those pathways include integrated housing policy, climate-adaptive urban planning, expanded access to finance and stronger local governments. None are especially novel. What is new is the scale of urgency. By 2050 another 2bn people are expected to move into urban areas. Unless cities become dramatically more equitable, the next great wave of urbanisation may deepen instability rather than prosperity.
Carol Archer of the University of Technology Jamaica praised the report for revisiting “what has worked and what has not” in housing policy over the past half-century. That historical reckoning matters. Since the 1970s governments have oscillated between state-led mass housing, deregulated property markets and public-private partnerships. None has adequately solved the problem because all have underestimated one fact: housing is not merely infrastructure. It is the foundation of citizenship itself.
The world’s housing crisis is therefore not simply about homes. It is about whether cities remain places where ordinary people can live at all.
