March 2010. DAG’s Director, Kailash Bhana led a delegation to the World Urban Forum (WUF) V Bridging the Urban Divide, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. The delegation comprised the Executive Directors of Afesis Corplan and the Built Environment Support Group; a senior member of staff from PlanAct and Helen Macgregor, Programme Leader at DAG.

DAG’s delegation was joined by the Deputy Minister for Human Settlements, Ms Zou Kota-Fredericks and her team in a special exchange visit to Sau Paulo and Rio de Janeiro, hosted by Cities Alliance, Brazil.

The WUF focussed on the right to the city and incorporated presentations and workshops from leading organisations, universities and institutions active in the field. The event presented DAG, and its partners, with the opportunity to engage in a number of critical debates around the social and productive function of the city, property and land. The forum highlighted the right to the city as a contested right, which requires the active ‘struggle’ of civil society.

Subsequent to the WUF, DAG’s delegation visited Sao Paulo and Brasilia where they met with a range of civil society groups (including Polis and Bento Rubiao) and government representatives involved in crafting and implementing the Statutes on the Right to the City.

The World Urban Forum, Bridging the Urban Divide, and exchange visit resonated well with DAG’s current advocacy and lobbying strategy around the right to the city and the lessons learnt have already influenced the themes for the DAG National Conference entitled ‘Building a New Urban Order: Re-imagining the City’ scheduled to be hosted in Cape Town in October 2010.

For more information on DAG's National Conference contact Helen Macgregor: This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it