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NAtion Forum has opened in the Canadian city of Vancouver with a call on government leaders mostly from developing countries to make their cities sustainable for both the poor and rich.



While opening the five-day event on Monday, the Under Secretary General and Executive Director of the UN-Habitat, Ms Anna Tibaijuka, said cities in both developed and developing countries are becoming less sustainable because of lack of political will.



Why are urban slums, which contain over one billion people still growing at the rate that outpaces all attempts to deal with them



Leaders of nearly all member states have not acted fully on their commitments. It'ss a failure of a political will, she said.



The forum under the theme, Our Future: Sustainable Cities - Turning Ideas into Action is jointly sponsored by the Canadian government and the UN-Habitat for human settlement and is attended by over 15,000 from 150 countries.



Ugandan Minister of Water and Environment, Ms Maria Mutagamba led the Ugandan team to the conference.



The former Kampala mayor, Mr John Ssebaana, and the former Housing State Minister, Capt Francis Babu, are also attending the conference, which would among other issues discuss the challenges of urbanisation.



Tibaijuka said there is lack of support for proper urban planning and development institutions especially in the area of housing and infrastructure finance.



The poor who live in the cities work so hard yet earn so little. They are the majority renters. We are opposed to their eviction from the cities.



We call for pro-poor housing finance institutions. Leaders should realise that cities and the people who live and work there are integral to national development, she said.



She added, How we plan and govern our cities will determine whether our collective future will be bright and sustainable or brutal and chaotic.



The UN-Habitat report titled State of the World'ss Cities Report 2006/7 shows that urban dwellers are in a bad state than their counterparts in rural areas.



It shows that the urban poor suffer from an urban penalty and that the world'ss one billion slum dwellers are more likely to die earlier, experience more hunger and disease, attain less education and have fewer chances of employment.



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