The publication, headlined "The National Input of the Republic of Croatia", has been compiled and published by the Croatian Institute for Spatial Development in cooperation with the Ministry of Construction and Physical Planning and several other ministries and state agencies.
The publication deals with urban demographic issues, land and urban planning, urban economy, environment and urbanisation, urban governance and legislation and challenges in those fields.
The head of the Institute for Spatial Development, Irena Matkovic, said that Croatia's specific feature in relation to global trends was depopulation of towns and small urban settlements.
"The world is faced with rapid urbanisation... In Croatia, only big cities maintain their number of residents, while small and medium-sized towns are faced with emigration and scaling-down of economic activity," she said, calling for ensuring conditions for the survival of small and medium-sized urban settlements.
On the other hand, Croatia can boast of the fact that every citizen has access to drinkable water and that it has made progress in environmental protection, she said.
Habitat conferences are held in a bi-decennial cycle (1976, 1996 and 2016), and the United Nations General Assembly decided to convene the Habitat III Conference to reinvigorate the global commitment to sustainable urbanisation, to focus on the implementation of a “New Urban Agenda”, building on the Habitat Agenda of Istanbul in 1996.