00:01Hello, I'm David Simon, a Professor of Geography at Royal Holloway in the University of London,
00:07and I'm both honoured and indeed delighted to have been nominated as an awardee this year
00:14for the Icons of Change International Awards, honouring people who've worked on sustainable
00:21development. Although I've lived and worked in the UK most of my career, I'm actually a native
00:26of South Africa, where growing up under apartheid, I always was keenly aware of the structural
00:34inequalities and discrimination on all aspects of life, including access to the environment
00:41and, of course, the fundamentally unsustainable conditions under which the majority of the
00:47country's inhabitants had to live. That experience, as well as seminal exposures to the changing ethos
00:55of conservation away from the old-fashioned fortress nature towards inclusive conservation,
01:04which underpins today's sustainable development agenda, has been a guiding light through my career
01:14as well as my lived experience and personal practice. Career-wise, I have always engaged,
01:24perhaps as a result of what I've just explained, with non-academic counterparts, including those working
01:32in local, regional and national governments, as well as civil society organisations, NGOs,
01:39and at times also the private sector. And that sort of multi-stakeholder perspective, as we tend to call it
01:47today, has imbued in me since very early in my career the importance of that transdisciplinary
01:56practice and also the idea that expert knowledge is not the knowledge, it is not superior to all others,
02:05but indeed is merely one of many forms of knowledge, including those of different professional
02:11communities of practice, lay people and, crucially, indigenous and other hard-to-reach communities,
02:22all of which have something of value in helping us to understand the complexities and the proverbial
02:28wicked challenges of addressing sustainability and resilience.
02:35I got involved in the SDGs fairly early in the campaign to create a dedicated urban goal, which ultimately came
02:47to be called SDG 11 on sustainable and inclusive settlements and communities. At the time that I took over at
02:56the helm
02:57of one of the leading international research centres on sustainability, Mr Urban Futures, which was based
03:04at Schalmers University in Gothenburg in Sweden, but which operated primarily through different forms of transdisciplinary
03:11co-design and co-production in different multi-stakeholder platforms in cities in different parts of the world,
03:20including my hometown, Cape Town, at the University of Cape Town, and including the municipality and other organisations.
03:28I became one of the leaders of the campaign, hosted one workshop here at Royal Holloway and one
03:34at Mr Urban Futures in Gothenburg, and we also, as part of that process, undertook a pilot study
03:43to test the draft targets and indicators as we had them at a workshop in January 2015,
03:52and on the basis of which various of the targets and indicators were modified in terms of the final form,
04:02the description of variables, the combination of variables, in order to ensure that they would be relevant
04:09and practicable for as large a number of municipalities and other forms of local government around the world
04:15as possible, bearing in mind their huge diversity. After the goals were adopted and began to be implemented
04:23at the beginning of 2016, we then undertook a three-year longitudinal study to carry on that work
04:31in seven different cities around the world, on all the major continental regions apart from Australasia,
04:38and to understand the reception that they obtained, the extent to which the work that we'd done previously
04:45was being assimilated, also the work of other research centres that had an input to the process,
04:51as well as revisions from within the UN system itself. And that went on for three years,
04:56and all those results have been published in a string of journals, again, provided to the UN Department
05:04of Economic and Social Affairs, where the Statistical Unit is based, and have fed into some of the more recent
05:11modifications during the first few years of the SDGs' life. I then also consolidated all of that and everything else
05:22with a monograph published in 2014, just around the time of the mid-term review of the SDGs,
05:29and that is the most detailed and carefully disaggregated study of progress towards achievement
05:41of SDGs during the first half of its 15-year life. And it parallels very closely the findings of
05:48UN Habitat's own mid-term review report published at the end of 2023, and titled Rescuing SDG 11,
05:58which tells its own story. So that work continues in different ways, even though Mr. Owen Futures
06:04is no longer active as a centre, its funded life came to an end. But many of the issues,
06:12the principles and practice are being deployed, and I continue to do that sort of advisory work
06:19with local authorities, with international agencies, including UN Habitat, in various different guises.
06:26So once again, thank you so much, and I'm very honoured to receive this award.
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