World Bank

The World Bank provides a wide array of financial products and technical assistance and helps countries share and apply innovative knowledge and solutions to the challenges they face.  

The World Bank’s work in urban development aims to build sustainable cities and communities through an urbanization process that is green, inclusive, competitive, and resilient. The Bank invests an average of $5 billion in planning and implementing lending projects on sustainable cities and communities every year to help cities meet the critical demands of urbanization.  

The World Bank adopts integrated approaches to transform the fundamental systems of cities, focusing on four priorities: 

1. Enhance Planning System and Local Capacity: Helping cities strengthen their planning systems and local capacities to better design, plan, and manage city assets and urban environments.

2. Strengthen Fiscal and Financing Systems: Supporting cities to maximize access to finance, including through private sources and enhancing fiscal and financial systems.

3. Promote Territorial and Spatial Development: Analyzing cities not only as individual entities but as interdependent networks and identifying priorities of lagging regions, connecting urban and rural spaces, and addressing spatial inequalities to enable faster economic growth.

4. Build Climate-Smart and Urban resilience: Improving cities’ capacity to adapt to a greater variety of changing conditions and to mitigate the impact of climate change through building infrastructure resilience, mobilizing capital, and financing climate strategy and analysis.