Siemens Teams up with UN-Habitat to Produce ‘Urban Planning for City Leaders’
Urban Planning for City Leaders is a UN-Habitat initiative to provide local leaders and decision makers with the tools to support urban planning good practice. It aims to inform leaders about the value that urban planning could bring to their cities and to facilitate a collaborative dialogue between leaders, policy makers and planners on urban development.
The UPCL guide was produced with financial support from Siemens. The book was published in 2012, and since then it has remained one of the most downloaded UN-Habitat publications to date. The publication has been downloaded 23,688 times from 2012 to date from the UN-Habitat website.
Training Programme on UPCL Guide
With the support of Siemens in partnership with CityNet, UN-Habitat is conducting training based on the UPCL guide in different regions since 2013. The target groups of this training event include urban planners, city managers, and city level policy makers. So far, two training events have been conducted successfully, one in Kuala Lumpur (23-26 September 2013) and one in Hanoi (5-7 December, 2013).
The first training event in Kuala Lumpur was organized for Asia-Pacific region. In this training, 25 city leaders from 11 different countries of the Asia-Pacific region participated, and 15 attended from different parts of Malaysia.
The second training in Hanoi was organized with the support of Vietnam Urban Planning and the Development Association and Korean International Development Agency (KOICA). UN-Habitat’s office in Vietnam was responsible for overall coordination and management of this training event. In this training event, 48 local participants attended, including city managers, members of the Committee of Vietnam (district level), as well as planners and academics from Hanoi Architecture University. The training was focused on different urban planning challenges in Hanoi city.
UN-Habitat is now planning to offer this training programme based on UPCL more broadly, because of increasing demand in different member states and regions. In 2014, nine UPCL training events have so far been planned in Vietnam, Bangladesh, Singapore, Mexico, South Africa, Kenya, Rwanda, and Nigeria.
