United Cities and Local Governments (UCLG) is an umbrella organisation for cities, local governments and municipal associations throughout the world. United Cities and Local Governments was founded in 2004, when the existing local government organisations - the International Union of Local Authorities (IULA), the United Towns Organisations (UTO) and Metropolis – united their respective global networks of cities and national associations of local governments in a single organisation.(FCMU). United Cities and Local Governments' headquarters, the World Secretariat, is based in Barcelona, Spain. UCLG is the largest local government organisation in the world and understands itself as the united voice and world advocate of democratic local self-government, de facto representing over half the world's population, the cities and association members of UCLG are present in over 120 UN Member States across seven world regions:
Africa (UCLGAfrica), Asia-Pacific (UCLG-ASPAC), Europe (CEMR), Eurasia (UCLG EuroAsia), Middle East and West Asia (UCLG MEWA), Latin America (FLACMA),and North America (UCLG North America). UCLG has also a dedicated "regional" Section for large metropolitan Areas, Metropolis.
Over 1.000 cities are direct members of United Cities and Local Governments, as well as 112 national associations which represent all the cities and local governments in their respective countries. Members vary, from small cities to national local governments associations and regional associations.
On May 8th 2004, United Cities and Local Governments (UCLG) adopted the Agenda 21 for culture as a reference document for its programmes on culture and assumed the role of coordinator of the process subsequent to its approval.
Its President since November 2010 is Mayor Kadir Topbaş (Istanbul). He replaces Mayor Bertrand Delanoë (Paris). Accompanying the Mayor of Istanbul, as Co Presidents are Antonio Costa of Lisbon, Portugal; Johnny Araya of San Jose de Costa Rica; Wan Qingliang of Guangzhou, China; Muchadeyi Masunda of Harare, Zimbabwe; and Ilsur Metsin of Kazan, Russian Federation. Ted Ellis, Mayor of Bluffton Indiana USA is the Treasurer.
The city of Rabat, Kingdom of Morocco will host the next world congress of UCLG in 2013.
Read more about United Cities And Local Governments: Committees and Working Groups, External Links
Famous quotes containing the words united, cities, local and/or governments:
“The white American man makes the white American woman maybe not superfluous but just a little kind of decoration. Not really important to turning around the wheels of the state. Well the black American woman has never been able to feel that way. No black American man at any time in our history in the United States has been able to feel that he didn’t need that black woman right against him, shoulder to shoulder—in that cotton field, on the auction block, in the ghetto, wherever.”
—Maya Angelou (b. 1928)
“Like other cities created overnight in the Outlet, Woodward acquired between noon and sunset of September 16, 1893, a population of five thousand; and that night a voluntary committee on law and order sent around the warning, “if you must shoot, shoot straight up!””
—State of Oklahoma, U.S. public relief program (1935-1943)
“While it may not heighten our sympathy, wit widens our horizons by its flashes, revealing remote hidden affiliations and drawing laughter from far afield; humor, in contrast, strikes up fellow feeling, and though it does not leap so much across time and space, enriches our insight into the universal in familiar things, lending it a local habitation and a name.”
—Marie Collins Swabey. Comic Laughter, ch. 5, Yale University Press (1961)
“Nobody thinks in terms of “human beings.” Governments don’t, why should we? They talk about people and the proletariat; I talk about the suckers and the mugs. It’s the same thing.”
—Graham Greene (1904–1991)