Tannya Pico
Moderator
Urban Planning Systems are crucial related to implementing resilience and integrated development of urban territories, especially related to adaptation to climate crisis, achieving carbon-neutral territories, including the Housing Matters. Urban Planning Systems are the reference framework for a balanced urban development and are key assets towards better resilience, including Housing development. However, current national policies and their planning systems are inherited from previous -sometimes old- regulations from past centuries and not really adapted to the most recent challenges cities and territories are facing worldwide.
Also, many national urban policies focus on problems rather than potentials. National governments intervene in almost all the policy domains that affect cities, but explicit "urban policies" are often narrowly framed at national level. Furthermore, urban policies are frequently designed in response to specific urban problems and often target only what are deemed to be particularly "problematic" cities or neighborhoods. And city reform efforts are often undermined by lack of coherence between national and city-level policies. The broader needs of cities and built environments are often poorly understood, as are the effects on urban places of national policies that governments may not consider to be "urban policy".
The networking event will elaborate on the urgent need to transform planning systems and urban policies into resilient and coherent legal planning frameworks, discuss the questions of integrated guidelines, including the essential question of Housing. The presentations and roundtable discussion, together with interaction with attendance, will discuss the challenge of achieving a real coordination across sectoral policies, given the fact of the complex array of institutions involved in national policies (breaking the silos). The event will also collectively identify a set of concrete recommendations and actions.
The Networking event will share actual experiences of innovative urban planning policies in Middle-East (Saudi-Arabia, Emirates) as well as Africa, France and Korea, and elaborate on practical solutions to achieve resilience and carbon-neutral cities.
The Networking Event will engage with diverse actors of urban development from different countries and culture from Africa, Asia, Latin-America and Europe, including international organizations, donors, university members and local governments.
It will demonstrate that a better understanding and reconsideration of urban planning systems are key in achieving the sustainable development goals towards resilient and carbon-neutral cities. Indeed, urban systems are influencing substentially the carbon emissions by taking unsustainable decisions, not considering natural resources, and more. A broad awareness raising action is needed, together with the demonstration and implementation of new techniques of carbon capture, climate adaptation and knowledge sharing. The event will engage a broad discussion on the need to review the urban planning systems and develop it according to the current challenges of our societies globally, especially climate adaptation and carbon-neutral cities. The capitalisation of the outcomes of the event will lead to the elaboration of an online portal collecting urban planning systems, best practices and recommendations, in the spirit of the ISOCARP Publication "IMPP - International Manual of Planning Practice" published 2015.