Expectations of the "City Summit" were high in Istanbul eight years ago. After months of preparatory meetings and the creation of numerous national Habitat II committees, people arrived in Istanbul with a sense of excitement.

More than 15,000 people participated in the two-week event. Many of the urban interest groups gathered in sites around the city: the architects, the mayors, the national academies of science, and the specialists in urban environment, water, housing, land use, construction, and those interested in the impact of urban policies on women. There were intense debates in hundreds of sessions. And many believed that their conclusions would have an impact on the inter-governmental process underway in the formal United Nations meeting at the Hilton Conference Center. The key focus of that meeting was to be the Habitat Agenda, a document summarizing the current state of policy and urban understanding, and setting out an agenda for policy and action in the years to come.

As for the impact and consequences of those heady days, there are five categories that might be considered - national policy changes, new financial resources for cities, new ideas, institutional mobilization, and networking.

On national policy changes, with hindsight, I would suggest that Habitat II has not brought significant policy change in either developing or developed countries. As a compromise document, I believe that the Habitat Agenda was not sufficiently forward-looking in anticipating the heavy economic and social impacts of globalization on cities. Its content contrasts sharply with Agenda 21 adopted at the Rio Summit on Environment in 1992. Agenda 21 indicated a large number of controversial but needed changes in environmental policy. Agenda 21 subsequently led to Local Agenda 21. The Habitat II Agenda did not "force the issue" in the same sense. I would therefore consider it a lost opportunity to indicate the way forward.

Despite the generally agreed conclusion that urban growth was placing huge financial demands on cities, the Habitat II conference produced only one major financial commitment, $15 billion in new urban lending by the World Bank. This commitment was made by Caio Koch-Weser, then Managing Director of the Bank, and now Deputy Minister of Finance in Germany. It was intended to demonstrate that the World Bank would work with countries to address urban poverty, urban environmental problems, and to strengthen urban management by local institutions.

This commitment represented a tripling of annual urban lending by the Bank. Regretably, no other multi-lateral or bi-lateral institution made a significant financial commitment at Istanbul. Several years later, the Cities Alliance was formed, but this cannot be directly attributed to the Istanbul deliberations.

When it comes to new ideas, despite the great excitement and energy generated at Istanbul, the meeting did not produce many new ideas. Most discussions remained within their respective disciplines and interest groups. There was much "cylindrical thinking" but not cross-sectoral explorations of how new solutions might be found. With hindsight, it can also be said that very little consideration was given to the growing pressures of globalization. A textual analysis of the Habitat II documents is quite surprising in this regard. One exception was the publication of a book for the conference, Preparing the Urban Future: Global Pressures, Local Forces (Michael A. Cohen, Blair Ruble, Joseph Tulchin, and Allison Garland; Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996). It explicitly addressed the impact of global pressures on many dimensions of cities.

I believe that this critique is quite important because the intellectual legacy of Habitat II is quite thin. What it did lead to was the creation of the two UN campaigns for land tenure and urban governance, both critical priorities in urban policy. But these two issues had been identified well before Habitat II and neither of them had received particular emphasis in the debates in Istanbul.

As for institutional mobilisation, what did prove to be an important result of Habitat II was the opportunity it provided to assemble many different urban interest groups and organizations. This led to two kinds of mobilization: the first was the growing realization among local government and cities organizations that they could be more effective if they worked together. The result has been the May 2004 formal merger of Cités Unies, the International Union of Local Authorities, and Metropolis. This merger can be directly traced back to the meetings of these organizations in Istanbul in early June 1996.

The second mobilization has been the movement of slum dwellers organizations and their growing connections. One case has been the successful growth of Shack Dwellers International (SDI) from SPARC in Bombay, now with organizational partners in South Africa, Kenya, and the Philippines. SDI learned some of its skills in the Istanbul process. Both of these kinds of organizations will become increasingly significant in urban policy discussions and urban practice in the years to come.

Obviously one aspect of institutional mobilization was networking. But I believe that this went much further towards "internationalizing the urban challenge", bringing many organizations into the same broad sphere of activity. The international urban enterprise has grown rapidly since that time.

Finally, I believe that Habitat II was probably a necessary step along the way to strengthening understanding of the international sharing of urban problems across the world. With hindsight, while some progress was made, it seems like a missed opportunity to advance at a faster pace in identifying new solutions, generating new ideas, or forming new partnerships. Future urban meetings such as the World Urban Forum in Barcelona in September 2004 and its follow up in Vancouver in 2006 will hopefully accelerate the pace of progress in cities.

Michael Cohen is the Director, Graduate Program in International Affairs, New School University, New York, and former Senior Advisor and Chief, Urban Development Division, at The World Bank.