UN-Habitat commissioned a series of background reports to enhance the Global Report on Human Settlements 2009 (subtitled ‘Planning Sustainable Cities’) by illustrating ‘empirical conditions and trends, as well as effective policy responses’. These are now downloadable, free of cost, on the UN-Habitat website (click here to visit the download page).
The selection of reports includes several case studies of African experiences, including the following titles:
- Developing participatory planning practices in Kitale
- From conceptual frameworks to quantitative models: Spatial planning in the Durban metropolitan area, South Africa: The link to housing and infrastructure planning
- Linking the green and brown agendas: A case study on Cairo, Egypt
- Planning education in Ghana
- Planning within a context of informality: Issues and trends in land delivery in Enugu, Nigeria
- Self-help, a viable non-conventional urban public service delivery strategy: Lessons from Cameroon
Various ‘regional and thematic’ reports are also available, and AAPS members will be particularly interested in those dedicated to ‘revisiting urban planning’ in North Africa, and sub-Saharan Africa (consisiting of two separate reports dealing with Anglophone and Francophone countries respectively).
This is a valuable resource of in-depth empirical research of planning in Africa and other parts of the global South. Its usefulness applies to the production of planning-related academic research as well as the formulation of educational programmes based on empirical and highly contextualised planning knowledge. It therefore links with the AAPS’s initiative to promote case research and publication within African planning schools.
