How to Support Fast Growing Small Cities? UN-Habitat's Participatory Incremental Urban Planning Tool

Written by Christele Harrouk
Published on December 09, 2020

The Un-Habitat or the United Nations agency for human settlements and sustainable urban development, whose primary focus is to deal with the challenges of rapid urbanization, has been developing innovative approaches in the urban design field, centered on the active participation of the community. ArchDaily has teamed up with UN-Habitat to bring you weekly news, article, and interviews that highlight this work, with content straight from the source, developed by our editors.

In order to support local governments in developing countries to implement the New Urban Agenda and the Sustainable Development Goals, UN-Habitat has created the Participatory Incremental Urban Planning Toolbox, “a step-by-step methodology to assess, design, operationalize and implement urban planning processes”. The guideline proposes a timeline of phases, blocks, and activities, helping city leaders, stakeholders, and the community to have a comprehensive and strategic overview of the whole strategy.

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Providing a global framework of the whole planning process, UN-Habitat's Participatory Incremental Urban Planning Tool is dedicated to the city leaders, the city planners, the civil society, the investors as well as the private sector. Drawing a timeline of phases, blocks, and activities, the toolbox helps the different urban stakeholders to better understand their role in the city’s vision, policies, strategies, plans, and projects. Defining a process framework rather than a design framework, and establishing a simplified roadmap based on UN-Habitat’s extensive experiences in multiple cities, the incremental and flexible toolbox tailors the planning process, according to the available resources and capacities of the context. Moreover, promoting an intervention-oriented strategy, the open-source and modular guide places local authorities and citizens at the driver's seat of sustainable urban development.

By following the proposed planning recommendations, city leaders can have a better understanding of the key deliverables and the critical activities they should engage with, giving them a clearer idea of the plan and its impact on the residents. For the city planners and urban planning practitioners, the tool offers a step-by-step guide, a compilation of tools, operationalization, and implementation mechanisms to move the planning process from assessment to implementation. Finally, the tool is also designed to help civil society visualize in a simplified manner the complex process, and identify its critical role within the global vision.

Based on three main initiatives by the Un-Habitat - the New Urban Agenda (NUA), a shared vision for a better, more inclusive and sustainable urbanizing world; the International Guidelines on Urban and Territorial Planning (IG-UTP), a global framework for improving policies, plans and designs for cities and territories; and the 2030 Agenda and the Sustainable Development Goals, that sets the sustainable development roadmap – the toolbox proposes an incremental approach for urban planning.

Consisting of four main phases - the Assessment, the Plan, the Operationalization, and the Implementation - the guideline includes 15 blocks and 69 activities, enhancing the adoption of participatory, inclusive, and sustainable practices. In fact, various levels of participatory approaches are proposed to define a participation strategy that engages stakeholders and the community in the process. Discover below the main headlines of the step by step guide for Participatory Incremental Urban Planning.

First Phase: Assessment

Preparing and understanding the context and the current situation of the city.

Block A _ Contextualization

1- Physical, human, and information resource review
2- Legal, financial, partnerships and stakeholders review
3- Self-assessment internal working session

Block B _ Project Preparation

4- A guiding document
5- Resource mobilization
6- Project Office
7- Work Plan discussion between PO and champions

Block C _ Participation Set-Up

8- Participation strategy
9- Committee creation and Mobilization
10- Public launching with stakeholders

Block D _ Analysis & Diagnostic

11- Desk Research
12- Field research
13- Analysis
14- Analysis & Diagnostic workshop
15- Diagnostic

Second Phase: Plan

Developing the strategic framework which highlights the vision of the city, the conceptual plan that illustrates the main ideas, and the structure plan that identify the main uses per zone and the location of the infrastructure.

How to Support Fast Growing Small Cities? UN-Habitat's Participatory Incremental Urban Planning Tool - Image 14 of 23 — Courtesy of UN-Habitat

Block E _ Strategic Plan

16- Strategic Development Scenarios
17- Visioning Workshop
18- Spatial Strategy
19- Monitoring & Evaluation plan

Block F _ Conceptual Plan

20- Sustainable Urban Development principles
21- Conceptual planning workshop
22- Conceptual urban management boundary
23- Conceptual structure
24- Conceptual mixed-use planning
25- Implementation Strategy
26- Public hearings

Block G _ Structure Plan

27. Sustainable urban development standards workshop
28. Mobility system road network and standards
29. Integrated infrastructure network and standards
30. Urban green and pubilc space network
31. Smart mixed-use and density planning
32. Land subdivision standards
33. Heritage, cultural & social facilities
34. Environmental facilities
35. Housing policy
36. Implementation strategy

Block H _ Neighborhood Plans

37. Neighbourhood planning workshop
38.a Urban form and function (extension plan)
38.b Detailed density zoning (densification plan)
38.c Land readjustment / Slum upgrading / Rehabilitation planning (regeneration plan)
39.a Priority urban blocks design (extension plan)
39.b Urban form and function (densification plan)
39.c Urban form and function (regeneration plan)
40. Urban street design
41. Integrated infrastructure design
42. Public space design
43. Strategic and catalytic design
44. Social housing typologies
45. Implementation strategy