SURGE Umbrella Program

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 (MOLIT), 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.

In 2024, SURGE launched the Global Urban Housing Program to address the urgent need for affordable housing in rapidly urbanizing cities and countries.

Funded by the Korean Research Institute for Human Settlements (KRIHS), the program aims to serve the surging global demand for housing, particularly among lower-income populations. With at least 1 billion people living in slums and 74% of people in low-income countries surviving on US$2 per day, the program targets key areas across the housing value chain, including:

• Promoting policies that improve the enabling environment for the supply of housing and housing financing
• Supporting governments to improve access to land and basic infrastructure
• Promoting better urban and city planning
• Financing and building capacity of developers
• Supporting low cost, innovative and resilient construction models and materials
• Implementing affordable and sustainable housing finance instruments.

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 the Republic of Austria's Federal 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.