Urban Journalism Academy (UJA) during the URBAN FUTURE Conference 2019
Event date 24 May 2019 08:30 – 12:30
Introduction
UN-Habitat and Habitat Norway have the great pleasure to invite to an Urban Journalism Academy (UJA) during the URBAN FUTURE Conference 2019.
The UJAs are pioneering and innovative initiatives promoted by UN-Habitat to further the knowledge and understanding of international and national journalists and media professionals of the social and economic issues facing cities in the twenty-first century.
The aim of this UJA is to meet and discuss urban challenges with leading urban professionals, bureaucrats and politicians that have been invited to deliberate better urban futures from a new angle: the Northern one. The event in Oslo seeks the engagement of journalists, media professionals and others who are interested or involved in urban development and the challenges facing Northern cities. Stronger engagement of journalists and media professionals on urban challenges encourages greater democratization, transparency and increases the awareness amongst the wider public.
The first UN-Habitat UJA was an innovative experience - developed in 2014 in conjunction with the Seventh session of the World Urban Forum held in in Medellin, Colombia - with the participation of more than forty journalists from all over the world and with the presence of representatives of internationally relevant media as Aljazeera (United Kingdom), The Guardian (United Kingdom), Inter Press Service (United States), La Nación (Argentina) and El Pais (Spain). Since then, more than 30 UJAs have been held in various parts of the world.
UJA objectives
- Strengthen journalists’ and media professionals’ capacity to analyze the overall process of urbanization by sharing with them substantive knowledge about the main issues of planning and management of cities, as well as by providing them technical expertise in gathering and examining urban data and indicators.
- To share outstanding experiences of communication for development in urban contexts as well as a selection of interesting examples of sustainable urban transformation projects.
- To make urban development issues and challenges clear and accessible to the general public, beyond the professionals, researchers and public authorities, bringing the urban debate closer to the average citizen.
