World Urban Forum – Baku, Azerbaijan

The session No Good Housing Without Good Transportation brought together around 40 participants during the World Urban Forum in Baku to discuss a simple but often overlooked issue in urban policy: there is little point in ensuring housing if it is located far from jobs, public services, and the networks that sustain everyday life. Organised by the Clean Mobility Collective, Instituto Pólis, and partners, the session was moderated by Andrés Linares (CMC) and combined presentations, audience discussion, and interactive participation through Mentimeter.

The starting point of the conversation was that housing and mobility are often treated as separate policy areas, even though their effects are inseparable in the urban experience. Access to the city depends not only on housing, but also on its location, transport quality, and proximity to schools, healthcare, public spaces, job opportunities, and support networks.

The panel brought together representatives from governments, urban planning institutions, and civil society organisations. Participants included Danielle Holanda (Brazil’s National Urban Mobility Plan), Sarika Panda Bhatt (Raahgiri Foundation, India), Larissa Menescal (Planning Institute of the City of Fortaleza), Rodrigo Faria Iacovini (Instituto Pólis), and Golda Hilario (Institute for Climate and Sustainable Cities, Philippines).

Contributions collected through Mentimeter showed broad convergence among participants. Respondents from countries including Brazil, Namibia, Uganda, India, Nepal, Nigeria, Poland, the United Kingdom, Kazakhstan, Spain, and Argentina highlighted that mobility should be understood as part of the right to adequate housing. They also identified the groups most affected by inadequate transport systems: low-income populations, women, older people, people with disabilities, informal workers, caregivers, and residents of peripheral areas.

Throughout the session, mobility was framed less as an engineering issue and more as a question of how opportunities are distributed within cities. The discussions highlighted that inequality is expressed not only in income or housing quality, but also in time — the time required to access work, education, healthcare, and essential services.

In the Brazilian presentation, Danielle Holanda addressed the National Urban Mobility Policy, the debate on the new legal framework for public transport, just transition, and Transit-Oriented Development strategies. The presentation stressed the need to coordinate land-use, housing, and mobility policies. Without this alignment, housing programmes can relocate low-income populations far from services and transport systems, increasing costs and travel times.

The intervention by Sarika Panda Bhatt expanded the debate beyond commuting. Drawing on experiences in informal settlements in India, she argued that mobility is shaped by everyday conditions that enable safe movement. Issues such as street lighting, drainage, sanitation, road quality, safety for women and children, and access to markets, schools, and public spaces were presented as essential. She also linked mobility to climate adaptation in vulnerable settlements exposed to floods and heatwaves.

Larissa Menescal focused on the relationship between mobility and territorial permanence. She argued that preventing forced displacement is also a mobility policy, since relocation to peripheral areas increases travel time, transport costs, and separation from jobs and services.

Rodrigo Faria Iacovini challenged planning models focused mainly on home-to-work commuting. The discussion highlighted “care routes” — daily, fragmented trips mostly carried out by women — which remain invisible in traditional transport planning.

The case of São Paulo illustrated both opportunities and limits of integrating housing and high-capacity transport. Participants stressed that without strong land-use regulation, public investment can increase land values and push low-income residents out of well-located areas. This raised a key question: who is able to remain near publicly funded infrastructure?

Golda Hilario linked these reflections to cities in the Global South, highlighting that climate vulnerability and urban inequality often overlap. Communities facing climate risks also tend to face precarious housing, weak infrastructure, and limited transport access. Therefore, adaptation policies must consider not only environmental targets, but also how resources and opportunities are distributed within cities.

The final discussion addressed recurring implementation challenges, including sustainable financing for public transport, regulation of private operators, protection against displacement and gentrification, pedestrian safety, and stronger public participation. The discussion showed that policy progress alone is not enough without institutional capacity, funding, and public oversight.

In conclusion, the session reinforced a shared understanding: housing quality cannot be assessed in isolation. Access to opportunity depends directly on mobility and location. Separating these agendas produces incomplete policies that fail to address urban inequality.

The materials produced during the session — including presentations, photographs, Mentimeter results, and discussion notes — provide a basis for future communication, international cooperation, and deeper work on care mobility, informal settlements, climate adaptation, and the right to the city.