SURGE Umbrella Program

The Urban Analytics and Technical Assistance Global Program delivers diagnostics for identifying key urban challenges while also supporting cities to identify policy interventions and priority investments for sustainable urbanization. 

The program supports sixteen cities across six regions in Angola, Bangladesh, Costa Rica, the Dominan Republic, Guatemala, Honduras, India, Jordan, Madagascar, Nepal, Nigeria, Pakistan, the Philippines, Romania, Sri Lanka, Uzbekistan, and Vietnam. These city engagements have facilitated the advancement of upstream data and diagnostics work aimed at identifying critical urban challenges and opportunities.

These engagements also provide technical assistance to enhance cities' knowledge and capacity in identifying, designing, and implementing investment projects. The program has successfully supported institutional and regulatory frameworks, evidence-based policies, and the generation of demand for new investment projects.

Beyond city-level activities, the program has also supported global-level analysis to help develop solutions to urbanization challenges worldwide. Through deep dive studies, SURGE has contributed to understanding the drivers of city growth, provided perspectives on anticipating the economic impacts of urban infrastructure, and generated innovative insights into the factors contributing to the vibrancy of cities. 

The World Bank's City Planning Labs is a technical assistance program which aims to enhance the technical and institutional capacity of municipal governments to produce, share, and utilize geospatial data for evidence-led urban planning.

City Planning Labs works with cities to support the strengthening of data foundations for evidence-driven decision-making for more efficient urban management and investments. In partnership with the Swiss Confederation State Secretariat for Economic Affairs (SECO), City Planning Labs builds on three successful city pilots in Indonesia, testing new approaches and tools to serve cities around the world. The program consists of the following four components:

1. Assesments, analytics, and plans for establishing data ecosystems in cities
2. Systemic support to the implementation of municipal spatial data infrastructure opportunities and actions
3. Incremental innovation and research and development which seeks to explore how to further develop existing tools, making them more user-friendly and better able to stand alone and be pre-filled with city-level data so that city staff can see how different scenarios would play out
4. Knowledge sharing and dissemination to increase awareness of City Planning Labs approaches.

The Global Smart City Partnership Program (GSCP) aims to introduce and mainstream smart city approaches and solutions in the World Bank Group engagement and investments by breaking sectoral silos and facilitating an integrated and innovative approach to urban development across sectors.

Launched in February 2018, the GSCP is now in its third phase of operations, supported by the Korean Ministry of Land, Infrastructure and Transport with co-financing from the Korea-World Bank Partnership Facility. GSCP's latest phase builds on five years of solid program implementation and proposes a more structured and refined approach to supporting World Bank Group teams and clients in planning for and advancing smart city ambitions.

The GSCP aims to scale and sustain the impact of smart city interventions by better connecting upstream strategic smart city planning with downstream project design, promoting a system of systems’ thinking for developing interconnected information and operational systems, and building institutional and human capacity for digital transformation.

The GSCP has three components:

• Technical support to smart city strategic planning: Providing upstream technical support to the World Bank Group teams in their engagements at the national, city and project level on smart city strategic planning.
• Operational support to smart city foundational projects: Building and strengthening foundational layers in smart cities projects under preparation or implementation (with a restructuring possibility or an unallocated budget).
• Smart city knowledge and capacity development: Producing knowledge products on key elements and common thematic areas of smart city development, for example, smart mobility, urban data platforms, smart urban labs and smart city governance.

The Europe and Central Asia Cities and Climate Change Program aims to support countries in Europe and Central Asia in addressing urban climate change mitigation and adaptation challenges. Its goal is to align the World Bank's urban operations in this region with the objectives of the Paris Agreement.

The program began in March 2023 in partnership with Austria's Ministry of Finance. It consists of two components which cover the following activities:

1. Technical assistance: The program provides technical assistance to client countries in preparing and implementing urban climate mitigation and adaptation investments. The program is supporting an initial cohort of eight countries in translating urban climate change mitigation and adaptation objectives into prioritized and no-regret investments at the city level. The selected countries include Albania, Armenia, Bosnia & Herzegovina, Kazakhstan, Tajikistan, Türkiye, Ukraine, and Uzbekistan. All these countries are currently working on new or existing World Bank lending projects aimed at tackling climate change challenges at the city level. A second call for proposals is currently ongoing.
2. Knowledge exchange and generation: The program supports knowledge exchange and generation to inform lending operations on urban climate mitigation and adaptation. This second component provides both targeted knowledge exchange and knowledge generation to develop solutions for urban climate change mitigation and adaptation in World Bank lending operations based on “real-life” experiences and best practices from Austrian cities and beyond that are pioneers in their fields.

The housing sector provides significant direct and indirect benefits to client countries and cities, ranging from providing shelter, creating jobs, access to credit, economic growth, and better health and education outcomes. However, the supply of housing has been limited and unable to meet the fast-growing demand in the context of rapid urbanization and changing demographics. As a result, globally at least 1 billion people live in slums, but most cannot afford housing with 74% of people in low-income countries living on US$2 per day.

To serve this high demand and especially the lower income segment, in 2024 SURGE launched the Global Urban Housing program. This program is initially funded by KRIHS and is aligned with Pillar 4 of the SURGE Results Framework. Some of the potential focus areas for SURGE across the housing value chain include: (i) promoting policies that improve the enabling environment for the supply of housing and housing financing; (ii) supporting governments to improve access to land and basic infrastructure; (iii) promoting better urban and city planning; (iv) financing and building capacity of developers; (v) supporting low cost, innovative and resilient construction models and materials; and (vi) implementing affordable and sustainable housing finance instruments.