DPU60 Day 1 – A Future for Development Planning: Thinking Across Boundaries

The DPU’s 60^th Anniversary has begun! The conversation quickly got going yesterday evening, laying down some of the key challenges we are going to confront over the next two days in thinking about, and across boundaries in development planning.

Professor Julio D. Davila, Director of the DPU, introduced the conference and chaired the session. He laid the gauntlet down to the conference participants by discussing Otto Koenigsberger and Patrick’s Wakely’s comments on ‘the job’ of the DPU and development practitioners. ‘The job’ is never complete, it simply changes, and therefore elaborating the different and changing boundaries we face in the present and future is paramount.

This first session featured speakers coming from the very different geographies of Asian, Africa and Latin America.

Aromar Revi (Indian Institute of Human Settlements) reflected on the challenges of urbanisation in Asian cities, and particularly his recent visits to China. He concluded by presenting his thoughts on the development of the Sustainable Development Goals. These include the importance of seeing the intrinsic links between the rural and the urban but appreciating that an urban goal is absolutely necessary. He questioned why there are not separate infrastructure or industrialisation goals, and some of the tensions between universal and local indicators. The latter is an important consideration in light of ‘global planning’ and the local impacts of such decisions.

In his presentation on the ‘mosaic of urban planning’ in Tanzania, Wilbard Kombe (Ardhi University, Tanzania) dug into some of the reasons behind this fragmentation. He pointed out how Asian countries appear to show a correlation between urbanisation and economic growth, but that this is not true for Africa. In examining the drivers of these mosaics he focused on governance and regulation – one of the most salient point being that urban development and planning is simply not a local governance priority in many contexts, as he called for a new paradigm for planning in African cities.

The final presentation, by Enrique Ortiz (National School of Architecture, Mexico), observed a trend of citizens without cities, with reference to self-enclosure away from the city through gated communities; and cities without citizens – the millions of informal urban dwellers without rights. His concerns are that prevailing models of urban development see change as dangerous and maintaining the status quo as conducive to opportunity, whereas the reverse must be understood as the way forward. This led into a discussion on the right to the city as a fundamental human right and a normative framework for assessing this vision of a just city.

Tying up some of the key issues raised, Sue Parnell (African Centre for Cities, University of Cape Town, SA) brought our present imperative into sharp focus. We stand at a vital moment in discussing the future of cities and of planning, and this conference marks another step in invoking a process of intellectual leadership to confront ‘the urban challenge’.