Tutorial (Video Transcript)
As demographic pressure keeps rising, cities face greater and additional challenges to adequately address the need for sustainable, resilient, participatory and inclusive urban development. UN-Habitat has created Our City Plans, a step-by-step toolbox and guide to support local governments and urban actors to better understand and develop urban planning processes that foster civic engagement and participation.
The methodology is incremental and flexible and allows cities to customize and adapt their planning process according to their context, needs, and available resources. Our City Plans lives in a digital platform to make the toolbox more accessible, interactive and easy to navigate, that can be translated into any language
Explore it at ourcityplans.org and register to access its main features!
The methodology is organized in four phases. Each phase contains blocks that focus on specific topics and have a clear outcome. Within each block, we have the activities and innovative tools.
- Phase 1 - Assessment: Aims to understand the current planning framework and context through an analysis and diagnostic
- Phase 2 - Planning: Focuses on the proposal of the plan, whether it is Strategic Development Plan at the city scale, a Land Management Plan, or a Neighbourhood Plan.
- Phase 3 - Operationalisation: Defines a set of actions and instruments to facilitate the implementation of the plan's strategies and projects.
- Phase 4- Implementation: Focuses on the approval of the Plan and the execution of the strategies and projects.
The toolbox has 58 activities in total that you can select from to adapt the methodology to your needs. To do so, you can filter them according to specific topics: climate action, participation, socio-spatial inclusion, and urban finance. Select a filter and the activities linked to those topics are highlighted. You can bookmark them and save them to build your customised planning process. You can always click on the star to remove these activities from your planning roadmap, or add any others that fit your purpose.
When you click on the activity you can see all the details: expected duration, objectives, results, tools, description, step by step instructions, and additional resources. The tools are downloadable templates that can be edited to adapt them to your needs. We have additional project management functionalities that will help you and your team follow and keep track of your planning process. You can control the status of your activity and monitor your progress. And you can add personalised notes for you and your team in each activity.
The Planning Experiences section highlights projects that have used Our City Plans methodology worldwide, so that you can learn from them and use them as reference in their process and outputs. You can find both planning experiences developed by UN-Habitat, and independent initiatives around the world. Share your experience with us to add it to the Our City Plans map!
We also compiled all the additional resources included in the toolbox. This is a repository of manuals, guidelines, publications and case studies, developed both by UN-Habitat and external partners. Filter them by keywords or phase to explore specific tags!
We invite you to explore and use Our City Plans toolbox to get guidance and support your city in developing more inclusive and integrated planning processes and build better, sustainable and more participatory urban futures!