Throughout the Habitat II preparation process, and in subsequent years, the Urban Indicators Programme has been the primary vehicle for objective reporting on the state of the world's cities and monitoring global progress on achieving the goals of the Habitat Agenda. The Indicators Programme was founded in 1993 initially as a local capacity building programme, but took the unique opportunity of the Habitat II Conference to conduct the first Global Urban Indicators Collection.

The Habitat Agenda called on UN-HABITAT to establish a means of analysing and monitoring major trends in urbanisation and the impact of urban policies, especially on vulnerable groups. It also sought to establish guidelines and strengthen data collection and analysis capabilities for national and local monitoring of the implementation of the Habitat Agenda through the use of housing and human settlements indicator programmes. UN-HABITAT was asked to gather indicators on the key areas of the Habitat Agenda, such as shelter, health, transport, energy, water supply, sanitation, employment and other aspects of sustainable urban development.

This was to be done by capacity building to assist countries and cities develop and monitor city strategies, undertake global analysis and publish global trends in cities and slums by maintaining a network of cities sharing quantitative information.

The emphasis on each of these activities has been somewhat different during each of three phases of the Programme between its inception and the present. In the first phase, during the Habitat II preparation period 1994-96, a set of global indicators was developed and field-tested and indicators manuals were produced. The system was implemented as a survey conducted largely by local consultants. Ultimately 237 cities submitted indicators for the first Global Urban Indicators Database (GUID1). This baseline collection for 1993, in which cities in Africa and the Least Developed Countries were particularly well represented, formed the basis for the first comprehensive analysis of global urban conditions.

In the second phase 1996-2002, the Global Urban Observatory (GUO) was formed. Partners including the World Bank, the International Council for Local Environmental Initiatives (ICLEI), and the software firm ESRI International developed training and software materials, and a number of cities joined the network. For Istanbul+5 in 2001, the original urban indicators were repackaged in line with the Habitat Agenda. Some 230 cities voluntarily submitted data to the GUID2 collection. It was then analysed for the first State of the World's Cities Report in 2001.

In the third phase, from 2002 to present, various GUO functions were unraveled during organisational restructuring, and parts of the Indicators Programme were combined with the earlier Statistical Programme to form the Monitoring Systems Branch of UN-HABITAT. A new emphasis on global reporting emerged, for Target 11, of Millennium Development Goal No.7 - to improve the lives of slum dwellers. Defining and measuring slums and security of tenure was now a priority, involving analysis of poverty within cities as well as between cities. The first formal survey of slums was conducted in Addis Ababa.

The Urban Indicators programme has been unique among global indicators programmes in advocating local choice and capacity building, rather than the collection of a fixed set of indicators. Major current projects of the Local Indicators Facility are with the Cities Network in South Africa, the State of Mexico, and a joint activity with the city network Metropolis in Addis Ababa, Aden and Iran.

Resources for a strongly centred GUO network have been slow to come. At present a number of different structures for Local and National Urban Observatories are being tried - based in government departments, NGOs, academia or cities networks. A major development has been the signing of an agreement in 2003 with ESRI for grants of GIS software and training to up to 1,000 participating cities, valued at a total $15 million.

The major organisational response of the Commission for Human Settlements and, later UN-HABITAT, was to establish the Global Urban Observatory to deal with these mandates in an integrated way.

The traditional need for establishing a fixed set of indicators has been offset by the quest for local indicators for local priorities and to involve local stakeholders in the indicators process. Many developing world cities have sought a fixed set of indicators while others, particularly highly industrialised cities within well established national statistical systems, have opted to maintain their own collections. UN-HABITAT has always resisted being too prescriptive in what is in fact a voluntary process. It has recommended a set of key indicators for the Habitat Agenda while encouraging and facilitating local indicators development.

Policy makers have always sought to reduce the number of indicators for simplicity, but in practice they always suggest more.

Funds have always been insufficient for the unglamorous but vital activities of data verification. Yet, a huge amount has been achieved by the Indicators Programme in monitoring the Habitat Agenda with a modest outlay of funds, and considerably more resources should be devoted to all three key programme activities - global monitoring, international networking and capacity building.

Joe Flood was the first Co-ordinator of the Indicators Programme 1994-6. He has since assisted UN-HABITAT devise a series of key urban indicators.