The CSCC pilot programme was a multi-level, multi-sector, cross-discipline initiative supporting Commonwealth cities to address barriers to inclusive, climate-resilient and well-governed urban futures. It was centred on four thematic Action Groups, housing systems, integrated planning, urban finance, and skills and competencies, through which states could deliver scalable, actionable progress on sustainable urbanisation.
Work across these groups evidenced the fact that the main barriers to sustainable urbanisation are systemic. Housing, planning, finance and skills function as a single ecosystem, with misalignment in one having a significant impact on the others and on their effectiveness.
The Integrated Urban Planning Action Group, led by the Commonwealth Association of Planners with The King’s Foundation, focused on secondary cities, where much of the Commonwealth’s urban growth is concentrated and where the resources to plan for it are most limited. Its key finding was that cities are expanding physically far faster than their populations, with sprawl consuming farmland, destroying ecosystems and locking in unsustainable land use for generations, and with spatial plans often disconnected from infrastructure delivery. In response, the group piloted the Rapid Planning Toolkit, developed by The King’s Foundation in collaboration with Commonwealth partners, in Belize City: a three-day participatory process through which government, technical agencies and communities agreed a City Charter and a twenty-year growth plan, a replicable model designed for precisely the secondary cities where growth is most acute.
The Housing Action Group, led by the Commonwealth Association of Architects, highlighted that the Commonwealth sits at the centre of the global housing challenge, with 35–45% of the world’s 1.1 billion slum dwellers living in Commonwealth countries. A comparative analysis across India, Kenya and Fiji, three very different contexts, revealed remarkably similar challenges: 60–80% of housing delivery is incremental and household-led, yet policy and finance remain oriented towards formal supply, leaving the majority beyond effective support, while rental housing is largely informal and public programmes are unable to keep pace. The group’s findings suggest reframing the problem: from a housing shortage to a mismatch between systems and delivery pathways; from eliminating informality to enabling and upgrading it; from expanding mortgage markets to diversifying finance for incremental building; from tightening regulation to adapting it for affordability and scalability; and from a focus on ownership to recognising rental as a core housing system. The group also collated more than a dozen scalable case studies of good practice, from in-situ slum upgrading at scale under Odisha’s Jaga Mission to participatory land readjustment delivering affordable, climate-resilient housing in Mpazi, Kigali, and locally sourced, cyclone-resilient bamboo construction in Fiji.
The Urban Finance Group, led by the Commonwealth Local Government Forum, convened a broad range of stakeholders and examined own source revenue across 18 Commonwealth member states, focusing on private financing and multilateral development banks (MDBs) in local infrastructure, alongside the challenges communities face in accessing climate finance. Its published findings concluded that the finance gap is a multi-level challenge, not just for cities, but for country systems as a whole.
The Expert Group on Skills and Competencies, led by the Association of Commonwealth Universities, brought together university members to examine the cross-cutting skills challenges facing higher education institutions as they attempt to navigate this change. This complemented the pilot programme’s wider work, which highlighted the shortage of professional planning capacity in secondary cities, many of which are growing more rapidly than larger cities. One Kenyan university provided a particularly useful case study. While it identified many of the same challenges as the wider programme, it also emphasised the importance of developing sustainable training and capacity-building pathways within devolved governance systems, highlighting the need not only to address current workforce gaps, but also to anticipate future skills requirements, including the emergence of new professions and the implications of technological change. This underlined the value of universities working with governments and cities to develop curricula that, alongside traditional professions such as planning, embed emerging ones such as urban finance, and the use of data and new technology.
The pilot programme demonstrates the success of multi-level approaches, highlighting that many solutions demand not new work, but that existing work is done differently, underscoring the value of the coalition-based approach embodied by CSCI and demonstrated by the CSCC. There also remains potential for formal Commonwealth institutions to expand their capacity building and implementation support, something to explore in preparation for CHOGM 2026.