Integrated Spatial Plan for Environmental and Socio Economic Resilience, Khorog, Tajikistan

UN-Habitat has partnered with the Aga Khan Agency for Habitat (AKAH) and the government of Tajikistan, through the Aga Khan Development Network (AKDN), to undertake the ‘Integrated Spatial Plan for Environmental and Socio-Economic Resilience’ in Khorog Tajikistan. UN-Habitat’s Urban Planning and Design Lab (Urban Lab), in a collaborative process with other units and branches within the UN-Habitat Planning Finance and Economy Section and the Urban Practices Branch and with AKAH’s Habitat Planning teams in Geneva and Tajikistan, aimed to provide planning direction to improve resilience and social stability for existing communities and accommodate the increasing populations in Khorog in a sustainable way through:

1) Developing strategies, masterplans, interventions, and regulations.

2) Knowledge creation, capacity building, and guidelines.

More specifically, the project aimed to provide environmental, legal, economic, spatial and infrastructure policies and projections, governance and management frameworks, with recommendations for transformative projects, and technical capacity building for stakeholders in planning. UN-Habitat provided planning expertise to guide the growth of Khorog, drawing on existing methodologies, toolkits and best practices in a collaborative and integrated way.

This project is one of several outcomes from an assessment of resiliency undertaken for Khorog in 2017 and 2018 by the Swiss State Secretariat for Economic Affairs (SECO) and Holinger, with partnerships from the international community that include the European Union for resilient infrastructure, the Government of Japan, the IFC and World Bank. The work of UN-Habitat in collaboration with AKAH is part of The Khorog Urban Resilience Planning and Proof of Concept Initiative, supported by SECO to drive resilient infrastructure investment and access to basic public services, intended to reduce risk, ensure more reliable infrastructure and a safer environment.

AKAH looked to UN-Habitat to support the Revised Town Planning process to ensure alignment of the town plan to UNDRR resilience principles and best practices. The integrated plan for environmental and socio-economic resilience in Khorog will integrate the disaster risk reduction approaches within the planning processes of identified projects. The project aims to promote Khorog as a model example of a resilient city in the country and localize the national commitment to the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development, the Sendai Framework for Disaster Risk Reduction, the Paris Agreement on Climate, and the Dushanbe Declaration for the International Decade on Water Action.