The ceremony of raising the flags of Poland and the UN started the 11th World Urban Forum in Katowice (WUF11) on Sunday. Sunday is treated as “day zero” of this several-day event, the official opening ceremony of WUF11 will take place on Monday morning.
The World Urban Forum is the most important and the biggest conference devoted to the creation and implementation of urban policies in the world, organised every two years under the aegis of the UN. The venue for the 11th edition of WUF under the slogan “Transforming Cities for a Better Urban Future” is the International Congress Centre in Katowice (ICC). The event is organised by UN-Habitat, the UN agency for urbanisation and urban settlements. On the Polish side, the World Urban Forum is being prepared by the Ministry of Funds and Regional Policy and the City of Katowice.
The flags of Poland and the UN were hoisted on masts set up in the square between Spodek and the International Congress Centre, where debates and meetings will be held as part of WUF11. The ceremony was attended by UN-Habitat Executive Director Maimunah Mohd Sharif and Deputy Minister of Funds and Regional Policy Małgorzata Jarosińska-Jedynak, who is the government plenipotentiary for the preparation of WUF11. The flags were hoisted on the masts by officers of the Polish police and UN uniformed services.
According to the programme presented by UN-Habitat, Sunday is treated as “day zero” of the event. In addition to the flag hoisting ceremony, the work of the teams working on the recommendations of the declared WUF11 activities (Assemblies) was scheduled to begin. The official opening ceremony of WUF11 will take place on Monday morning; the closing ceremony on Thursday afternoon. The four days of the summit will be filled with numerous debates, discussions, workshops, round table dialogues and informal talks.
The venue for WUF11 is the International Congress Centre in Katowice, where, among other things, the UN World Climate Summit (COP24) was held in December 2018. On that occasion, the space of the Katowice ICC was significantly expanded, making use of the adjacent Spodek, as well as temporary facilities built on the square in front of the Spodek and the spacious car park of the Katowice Cultural Zone, connected by covered walkways. The same is true now.