UN-HABITAT has played a central and very active role in the recent debate on the future of urban planning. For years planning was considered an inefficient tool, unable to address development effectively.

However, renewed attention to urban planning has recently emerged. Shifting dramatically from its initial ambition to command and control the city, planning has started reassessing itself in the new context of urbanization.

Rapid urbanization (together with climate change) is emerging as the most challenging issue of the twenty-first century. As the region with the highest percentage increase in urban population over the last two decades, Asia faces fundamental economic, social and environmental challenges to its continued development.

However, well planned and effectively governed and managed cities can provide the solution to many of these challenges. With the right economic policies and more equitable growth, poverty and slum reduction are achievable goals. Putting cities on the right path now can result in thriving, dense, green, resilient and sustainable cities.

La Estrategia de Apoyo a la Gestión Urbano Ambiental de Arequipa fue iniciada por la Municipalidad Provincial de Arequipa a principios del 2003 y finalizó su segunda fase en enero del 2007. Ha sido apoyada por PNUMA y UN-Habitat, organismos que junto con el Consejo Nacional del Ambiente (CONAM), el Ministerio de Vivienda,

Construcción y Saneamiento, a través de la Dirección Nacional de Urbanismo (VIVIENDA), el Instituto Nacional de Defensa Civil (INDECI) y el PNUD, están desarrollando la Estrategia de Apoyo a la Gestión Ambiental en el Perú. Arequipa es la primera ciudad participante en la estrategia a nivel nacional, que ha sido ampliada a las ciudades de Lima-Callao y Chiclayo.

Sus principales objetivos han sido elaborar un diagnóstico urbano ambiental de la ciudad para apoyar la comprensión del desarrollo urbano y el impacto en su entorno, así como mejorar la planificación y gestión urbano ambiental de Arequipa.

In Zambia the Sustainable Cities Programme was implemented in Lusaka from 1994-2001 to address high levels of poverty and inequality experienced in the city resulting from a shrinking economy as the country’s copper-dominated export sector started to dwindle and government’s capacity to adequately deliver public services was impaired. The city suffered major environmental challenges particularly air and water pollution; insufficient water resources; ineffective solid waste management; inadequate sanitation systems; traffic congestion; limited urban planning capacities and open quarrying.

In 2002, the programme was extended to Kitwe city, to help address environment-development problems of inadequate and inefficient urban services particularly in low income areas, growth and expansion of informal settlements; congestion in the town centre; air pollution and a declining economic base. This was coupled with weak institutional capacities that were unable to facilitate city-wide service delivery on a sustainable basis. In both cities the programme, founded on a broad-based stakeholder participatory approach, was targeted at building capacities in environmental planning and management (EPM) in urban local authorities and their partners; it also supported measures for poverty alleviation, particularly in unplanned settlements and promoted environmentally sustainable socio-economic development and growth.

This report documents the activities of the Sustainable Lusaka Programme and Sustainable Kitwe Programme in Zambia in the period 1994-2007.

Nuevos enfoques para construir procesos de planificación urbana y gestión ambiental en la ciudad se hacen necesarios para que la funcionalidad de los mismos sea sostenible.

Esta experiencia demuestra la importancia de integrar y asociar estrategias de planificación urbana ambiental con estrategias de desarrollo local y nacional. Es necesario crear nuevas plataformas de negociación entre el sector públicoprivado, de manera que se generen alianzas estratégicas para el desarrollo local.

The Sustainable CitiesProgramme/LA21 Programme in the Philippines was started in 1998 by UN-HABITAT in collaboration with the department of the environment and Natural Resources. It was targeted at secondary towns and was perceived as a localization of the Philippine Agenda 21. Its main purpose was to pioneer the integration of environmental planning and management within the city organizations using the Sustainable Cities Programme-Local Agenda 21 (SCP-LA21) approach.

Three cities were selected as demonstration cities€S,, that is, Lipa, Tagbilaran and Cagayan de Oro. By enhancing the capacity of local government units in participatory environmental planning and management, the programme sought to address issues of poverty, inequity, powerlessness, gender inequality, and environmental degradation evident in the participating cities. each city went systematically through a 4 phase environmental Planning and Management process as follows: Phase 1 - start up, Phase 2 €, strategy and action planning, Phase 3 € follow up and implementation, and Phase 4 € consolidation and replication.

Upon the termination of the Project in 2001, the application of the environmental Planning and Management process showed good prospects in curbing urban problems. The participating Local Government Units found that managing sustainable urbanization presented tremendous challenges, requiring them to undertake bold institutional and policy reforms and new urban environmental strategies.

The Sustainable Cities Programme (SCP) started in the Tanzanian capital, Dar es Salaam in 1992 under an initiative known as the Sustainable Dar es Salaam Project. Dar es Salaam was one of the first demonstration cities in Africa where environmental planning and management were revitalized under the SCP, a joint initiative of UNHABITAT and UNEP to implement Agenda 21.

Others cities were Ismailia in Egypt, Accra in Ghana, Dakar in Senegal, Ibadan in Nigeria, and Lusaka in Zambia.

Volume 2 | Volume 3 (PDF)

The Sustainable Cities Programme (SCP) is a world-wide technical cooperation activity of the United Nations. It works at city level in collaboration with local partners to strengthen their capabilities for environmental planning and management (EPM).

Each city-level SCP project is adapted to the particular needs, priorities, and circumstances of that city; nonetheless, all SCP city projects follow the same general approach and all are implemented through the same series of activities known as the SCP Process.