In 2015, the Montreal Declaration on metropolitan areas sought to contribute to sustainable urban development as set out in the 2030 Agenda and recognised the importance of metropolitan areas in achieving this. It included the transformations that had to take place in order to build solidarity-based, inclusive metropolises that respect biodiversity and the natural, cultural and landscape heritage. It also addressed demands such as the right to the city, metropolitan governance, fair funding and the recognition of diversity.

The New Urban Agenda, adopted at the UN Habitat III conference in 2016, laid out the plan for a paradigm shift based on the science of cities. It established standards and principles for the planning, construction, development, management and improvement of urban areas, in accordance with political, social, economic and environmental challenges.

The Barcelona Metropolitan Area (AMB) took up the mandate of the New Urban Agenda and in 2018 held the international congress Post-Habitat III, dedicated to analysing the future challenges of metropolises. In 2020, at the World Urban Forum, held in Abu Dhabi, a joint strategy was defined with UN-Habitat, which gave rise to the Memorandum of Understanding signed between this United Nations agency and the AMB.

In 2022, the MetroSolutions international congress, organised by the AMB, presented and discussed possible solutions that different metropolises around the world are offering in response to the major threats and challenges they face. In a global context of urbanisation and metropolisation, metropolitan solutions take the form of joint strategies and metropolitan policies that help metropolises move towards the goals of global development agendas. They also emerge as innovative responses to major metropolitan challenges and citizens’ needs. Metropolitan solutions must enable us to achieve the goals set promptly and appropriately. They involve policies or programmes that are: (1) linked to metropolitan policy and plans, (2) multidimensional (on a social, economic and community scale, among others), (3) multi-actor, because they bring together the various players in the territory (public, private and non-profit), (4) multi-level (not only on a metropolitan scale), (5) innovative, (6) inspired by the challenges of global development agendas and respond to them, while they also: (7) contribute to urban construction, (8) combine a type of action that emerge from the sum of infrastructures and programmes, and are evaluable for the whole population and in all territories (they are inclusive for people and for cities), (9) are ideally built with the participation of citizens and key actors, and (10) are adaptable and transferable to other metropolises. 

With 2030 on the horizon, the AMB Area for International Relations and Cooperation continues to work with the objective that metropolitan areas be able to build the necessary support networks to become political actors at the service of citizens, with the aim of achieving the goals of the 2030 Agenda and the New Urban Agenda. Thus, together with UN-Habitat and a group of national and international experts, we are working on debating, defining, characterising, identifying and transferring metropolitan management and action solutions that bring us closer to the goals set in the global agendas, so that the world becomes economically fairer, socially more equitable and environmentally sustainable.