The campaign for the inclusion of a specifically urban goal within the United Nations' Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) was challenging. Numerous divergent interests were involved, while urban areas worldwide are also extremely heterogeneous. It was essential to minimize the number of targets and indicators while still capturing critical urban dimensions relevant to human development. It was also essential to test the targets and indicators. This paper reports the findings of a unique comparative pilot project involving co-production between researchers and local authority officials in five diverse secondary and intermediate cities: Bangalore (Bengaluru),

The success of the Sustainable Development Goal 11 (SDG 11) depends on the availability and accessibility of robust data, as well as the reconfiguration of governance systems that can catalyse urban transformation. Given the uneven success of the Millennium Development Goals, and the unprecedented inclusion of the urban in the SDG process, the feasibility of SDG 11 was assessed in advance of its ratification through a series of urban experiments. This paper focusses on Cape Town’s participation in piloting SDG 11, in order to explore the role of urban experimentation in highlighting the partnership arrangements necessary to allow cities to meet the data and governance challenges presented by the SDG 11. Specifically, we focus on the relationship between data and governance that lie at the heart of the SDG 11. The urban experiment demonstrates the highly complex and multi-level governance dynamics that shape the way urban experiments are initiated, executed and concluded. The implications of these dependencies illustrate that more attention needs to be paid at the global level to what data are important and how and where the data are generated if SDG 11 is to be met. Overall, this paper makes the case that the success of SDG 11 rests on effecting local level change and enabling real opportunities in cities.Electronic supplementary materialThe online version of this article (doi:10.1007/s11625-017-0500-y) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users.

At the core of the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development is the imperative of monitoring progress and holding policy-makers accountable. For this purpose, 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and 230 global indicators were established with the double function of being a report card and a management tool. In the light of a pilot study about the experiences of local planning officials in the City of Gothenburg, Sweden, in relation to the suggested indicators for SDG 11, 'Make cities and human settlements inclusive, safe, resilient and sustainable', and a comparison with findings in four other cities, the paper argues for a need to reprioritize indicator criteria to serve better governance for sustainable development in diverse urban contexts worldwide.

A unique project by Mistra Urban Futures to test the draft targets and indicators of the proposed Urban Sustainable Development Goal (Goal 11) in five diverse cities in Europe, Africa, and Asia revealed numerous complexities and differences in data availability, potential accessibility, and relevance. Deploying the findings from Kisumu and Cape Town, we highlight the particular challenges posed by widespread urban informality. Similar issues apply across the global South. The targets and indicators rely on official/formal data, which are often of questionable reliability and exclude unregulated activities. The particularly problematic conceptualization of the slum/informal settlements indicator is examined in depth, along with indicators on transport and waste management.

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