Young Urbanist Present: Urban Planning in an International Context
Supporting Sustainable and Integrated Urban Development for Rapidly Growing Cities
Image courtesy of The Prince's Foundation
Date: Wednesday 13th July 2022
Time: 6:30pm
Venue: Buro Happold, 17 Newman St, London W1T 1PD
Speakers introduced by Savini Rajapakse, Urban Designer at The Prince’s Foundation:
Alice Preston-Jones, Senior Programme Manager, The Prince’s Foundation
Lucy Bretelle, Strategic Urban Planner, Buro Happold
Sika Cintantyadwisthi, Strategic Urban Planner, Buro Happold
Join us for a special Young Urbanist event on urban planning in a global context, exploring matters beyond the UK and the ‘Global North’.
Urban growth is currently occurring at phenomenal pace in many cities around the world. Some of these rapidly growing cities also severely lack professional resources and capacity, presenting a serious threat to the future resilience and sustainability of these environments.
Without effective spatial planning, unplanned development can quickly embed unsustainable land use patterns and this can have many detrimental effects on the health, social equity and economic performance of the city. In many situations, plans are often absent, not fit for purpose, developed in a sectorally siloed manner, or lack the means for implementation. The result is that crucial opportunities are missed to direct investment towards strategies that optimise environmental, economic and social outcomes.
Lucy Bretelle and Sika Cintantyadwisthi from Buro Happold and Alice Preston-Jones from the Prince’s Foundation will be presenting some key initiatives that are working towards supporting cities that are facing the threats of rapid unplanned growth.
The evening will be followed by:
Panel Discussion Q&A
Networking & Social
Buro Happold are working with city governments and urban actors of rapidly developing regions in exploring and designing solutions in response to the urban imperatives they face. Often with limited planning frameworks, the growth of those towns and cities bring a risk of uncontrolled sprawl or ribbon development, with inadequate infrastructure and service provision and encroaching on sensitive social and environmental systems. Buro Happold has been working with the counties of Kisumu and Homa Bay in Kenya to address the lack of a formal County Spatial Plan, facilitate discussion on the future of the county, inform policy development across multiple sectors, and help guide public and private investment, as well as supporting the preparation of the Local Physical Development Plans (LPDPs).
The Prince’s Foundation are working with international partners to develop a free online toolkit for local governments and mayors to implement rapid participatory planning processes, designed for cities that face a deficit of planning resource and expertise. The Rapid Planning Toolkit is a simple and straightforward set of activities that can be used to educate and implement participatory planning in response to rapid growth. This toolkit is in the final stages of its development and is being implemented in several test case-studies including Bo, Sierra Leone and Kazirgaon, Bangladesh.
