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The COVID-19 pandemic has led to a significant shift in the way people work, with an increasing number of individuals opting to work from home. Fewer commutes allow people to live further away from the city centre, where jobs typically concentrate. Against this background, this paper tests the hypothesis of a shift in housing demand away from the city centre towards the suburbs using a novel granular house price data set covering 16 OECD countries. The results indicate a flattening of the house price gradients in most large urban areas with profound consequences for housing policies and the city of the future.

The quality of Internet connections is increasingly important for people’s daily lives as work and access to services move to the digital sphere. Likewise, businesses and public agencies need to rely more and more on the digital networks for service delivery. However, the way individuals experience the Internet can vary substantially within countries, notably along the urban-rural continuum. Measuring such variation in a consistent way is important to understand where intervention is most needed to deliver better connections to everyone. This paper assesses within-country spatial disparities in connectivity across OECD and G20 countries, using publicly available data on the speed of connections from an Internet speed test provider, applying consistent spatial definitions – i.e. the OECD classification of regions and the Degree of Urbanisation. Using data from Denmark, it finds that the use of speed tests to assess the quality of internet connection is coherent with national sources. Results show that, in OECD countries, regions far from metropolitan areas can experience up to 24% slower Internet speeds than the national average. Overall, cities have 75% higher speed of connection than rural areas, on average.

German federal states and municipalities have engaged in decentralised development co-operation (DDC) since the 1950s. Germany provides over half of total official development assistance (ODA) in the world that is channelled as DDC. However, most of this support remains within German borders. To incentivise further international partnerships, the federal government has established dedicated programmes and financial support schemes for states and municipalities. This report presents key data on the DDC landscape in Germany and offers guidance on how to strengthen its role in enabling peer-to-peer learning and improve collaboration between German states and municipalities. It also showcases how to further raise awareness about the mutual benefits of DDC partnerships, including through better ODA data reporting and a harmonised approach to monitoring and evaluating its results across levels of government.

City-to-city partnerships and decentralised development co-operation (DDC) can play a key role in advancing the SDGs and in addressing global megatrends, the aftermath of the COVID-19 pandemic and other shocks. This report discusses the framework conditions for effective city-to-city partnerships and takes stock of existing monitoring and evaluation mechanisms. As a complement, it proposes a systemic monitoring and evaluation framework for city-to-city partnerships to localise the SDGs, combining self-assessment and SDG indicators. This framework aims to bridge the gap in terms of measuring the progress of cities engaged in partnerships on the 2030 Agenda and their compliance with the G20 Rome High-Level Principles on city-to-city partnerships for localising the SDGs. The report also presents lessons learned from a pilot-testing of this new framework and highlights policy implications and ways forward to enhance the sustainability, transparency and accountability of city-to-city partnerships, in a shared responsibility across levels of government and stakeholders.

Decentralised development cooperation (DDC), or partnerships for sustainable development between cities and regions in developed and developing countries, can help drive major global agendas forward. Achieving a sustainable, equitable and resilient future requires action from subnational governments in many key SDGs and emerging areas, such as the response to the global health crisis, support for refugees and implementing net-zero pathways. The Global policy toolkit: Guidance for practitioners shows how DDC can promote mutual benefits and peer-to-peer learning, bring development co-operation closer to people and their daily lives, and deliver technical services and expertise. By providing a repository of good practices and guidance on implementation modalities, the toolkit seeks to promote policy dialogue and mutual learning across DDC actors and to enhance DDC effectiveness, efficiency and impact worldwide.

This work leverages globally consistent data on parks from Google Maps, in combination with the computational power of Google Maps Directions API to quantify accessibility to parks across nearly 500 metropolitan areas in six countries: Estonia, France, Greece, Mexico, Sweden, and the United States. We combined high resolution population data from Worldpop with parks data and navigation estimates to measure: (1) Fraction of the population with access to parks within a 10-minute walk; and (2) the median walking time to the closest park. We find large differences in access to parks between countries, as well as large variability across cities and their respective commuting zones. To demonstrate how this framework can support cross country comparisons and efforts to track progress towards SDG11, we assessed access to parks by income group in selected countries, finding that the median walking time to a park is shorter for residents of low income neighbourhoods both in French and American metropolitan areas.

This paper assesses differences in life satisfaction along the urban-rural continuum in 111 countries across all world regions. It combines survey data with a consistent definition of settlements to maximise international comparability. Globally, once controlled for individual characteristics, life satisfaction in cities is slightly higher than in rural areas, although the difference decreases with development levels and disappears for high-income countries. Among the factors associated with such differences are city-rural gaps in reported health problems, in physical infrastructure (built-up area), in expectations for future economic conditions, as well as in perceived housing affordability. Finally, we show that life satisfaction also varies by city size. Globally, large cities between one and five million inhabitants drive the observed city-premium but stark heterogeneity exists across income levels. Residents in large metropolises over five million inhabitants report the highest and lowest life satisfaction in low- and high- income countries, respectively.

About 90% of homes in the Netherlands depending on natural gas for heating, the Netherlands has made a commitment to phase out natural gas by 2050. To achieve the goal, the Netherlands has rolled out a natural gas-free pilot programme in 66 neighbourhoods. These neighbourhood pilot projects enabled municipalities to learn what it takes to start energy transition. Based on a city survey carried out across 26 local governments, key findings from this report call on national and local governments joining up their efforts to take place-based measures. This paper is the first case study applying the policy framework presented in the OECD report Decarbonising Buildings in Cities and Regions published in March 2022. The present case study provides a deep dive into the Netherlands’ experience to demonstrate the potential of cities and regions to advance the decarbonisation of buildings.