The UN-Habitat on Thursday launched an initiative dubbed MetroHUB that seeks to promote development of metropolitan areas with more than two cities.

Remy Sietchping, Chief of the regional and metropolitan planning unit at UN-Habitat, said that the aim of the tool is to enhance the capacity of metropolitan and regional authorities to better manage new urbanization challenges.

"The MetroHUB metholody embraces a three prong approach on improving the governance, planning and finance capabilities of metropolitan areas," Sietchping said during the first UN Habitat Assembly underway in Nairobi.

The Initiative has already being piloted in Uganda and Colombia.

Sietchping said that the way urban areas grow has changed drastically in recent years because as cities expand across their administrative boundaries into their peri-urban cities they tend to link up to surrounding cities and spread out until they form metropolitan agglomerations.

Through adoption of the New Urban Agenda, Member States of the UN committed to support the strengthening of the capacity of sub-national and local government to undertake their functions.

Sietchping said that the metroHUB also contains the innovative tool of the Pyramid of Metropolitan Management.

"The tool demonstrates how 12 metropolitan management issues can effectively be addressed to support and monitor the goal to leave no one and no place behind," he added.

According to the UN-Habitat official, the initiative also identifies the fundamental issues faced by metropolitan areas and the pathways to simultaneously unleash, integrate and articulate the dimension of polices, governance, planning and financing.

Sietchping added that the pyramid of the metropolitan management will be the basis to assess metropolitan areas in five continents and to draft a global state of metropolis.