Danang, Vietnam 12 March 2015 –UN-Habitat in collaboration with the Danang Institute for Social Economic Development this week organized a workshop to launch rapid planning in the city and which brought together national and foreign experts. According to Deputy Chairman of  Danang People’s Committee, Mr Nguyen Ngoc Tuan, "Rapid Planning is an action-oriented research project that will address the actual and foreseeable issues of dynamic city development and the related challenges. The purpose of the project is to develop a rapid trans-sectorial urban planning methodology with a focus on urban basic services infrastructure, specifically targeting supply and disposal infrastructure.” On June 2014, Danang was chosen as 1 of 4 cities in the world to receive consultancy support to implement the project which aimed at building policies, developing sustainable, environmental friendly and highly competitive urban planning, in international market. "The project aims to find solutions for urbanization problems. It means in the process of urban planning we bring initiatives and solutions to ensure compliance with the demands of the future, increase the competitiveness of the city, make use of land resources water resources in a more effective way! ", Mr. Nguyen Quang, Habitat Programme Manager emphasized. “The Rapid Planning approach will support cross-sector integration, rapid data capture, establishment of planning values, subsequent scenario development, generation and evaluation of implementation options, vulnerability and resilience assessments and reality checks to support decision-making. So it can be seen as a consultancy tools for city leaders to find proper solutions for strategic targets of the city,” he added. City leaders support for Sustainable Development

Danang city leaders also showed their commitment in supporting the project to meet its goals to apply research results in reality to make the city become dynamic and developed sustainably. The project will be implemented on basis of three case cities including Danang. These are;  Kigali (Rwanda), Assiut (Egypt) and Frankfurt (Germany) as the reference city. “Frankfurt will provide experiences for other cities and also learn best practises from others’ muti-sectoral approaches”, Mr Dieter Steinbach, the project leader said. The budget for Rapid Planning in Danang city is USD 430,000 and is expected to run from March 2015 to March 2019, with a midterm report in December 2016. The project is also attached with duty to reduce risks related to climate change in Danang through green infrastructure integrated with water management. The project was developed under the umbrella of the Future Megacities Research Programme of the German Federal Ministry for Education and Research (BMBF) and will be implemented by UN-Habitat and the host city.