Land Use and Transport Planning

“We have already made progress. The national government has realized that there is a need for coordinated city and traffic planning for Nairobi and its satellite cities,” says Elliott Sclar, Director of CSUD.

CSUD

The Center for Sustainable Urban Development is a center within the Earth Institute of Columbia University in the City of New York. It carries out its work through partnerships between its New York based professional staff and partners at the University of Nairobi and the Kenya Institute for Policy Research and Analysis, among others. Approximately ten researchers and a varying number of students participate in the Centre. The Centre was established in 2004 and is financed by VREF through 2009. The Centre also has partial funding from the Rockefeller Foundation, which sponsored a month-long conference titled “Innovations for an Urban World: A Global Urban Summit,” which was held in Bellagio, Italy, in 2007.

Host organisation:
The Trustees of Columbia University, New York

Links:
The Centre’s website

The Center for Sustainable Urban Development (CSUD) in

New York aims to contribute to achieving physically and socially

sustainable cities, by establishing research and educational

exchanges with cities in developing countries, particularly with

cities in Sub-Saharan Africa.

Africa’s cities are growing faster than those in many other places in the world. The United Nations estimates that the number of people residing in African cities will grow from 210 million in 2000 to nearly 522 million in 2025. Therefore, the need for transportation and infrastructural planning is large. One problem is that cities often grow faster than the infra structure needed to support them. For that reason, the Center for Sustainable Urban Development (CSUD) at Columbia University’s Earth Institute in New York City is focusing on what is required to bring about integrated planning, as well as how different infrastructure and land-use plans can become useful for the development that is taking place. “We start with two premises: 1) the world today is predominantly urban, and solutions must, therefore, be globally viable while taking local perspectives and the city as a starting point; and 2) the world’s resources are limited. Our primary focus is on knowledge that is meaningful for middle- and low-income countries, but we also concern ourselves with challenges in our home region, the New York metropolitan area,” says Elliott Sclar, Director of CSUD.

Much of CSUD’s work is centered on developing research and educational exchange with cities in developing countries, with a focus on land-use and transportation planning. The purpose of this work is to stimulate cities to develop city and transportation plans as well as sustainable development policies. The Centre has, among other things, examined how information about an area of land is used, and how that information can be shared so that it becomes valuable and useful for a range of stakeholders (including, most importantly, the communities impacted). “We have focused on land use and transportation planning, which are two sides of the same coin. How land is used is central to development as a whole, and must be linked to transportation and other infrastructural investments, such as water and electricity supply,” says Elliott Sclar.

Ruiru

The Center has collaborated with the Department of Urban and Regional Planning at the University of Nairobi on a project which aims to initiate a planning process for Ruiru, one of six satellite cities outside the Kenyan capitol, Nairobi. “Ruiru is 16 kilometers from Nairobi and has all of the problems that are normally associated with fast-growing cities. There are slum areas, and the city has problems with water supply and transportation. Ruiru’s primary problem is that the city has not had an integrated plan for its infrastructure,” says Elliott Sclar.

A first step for the Centre was to map what was needed in the city, who should be involved in the process of developing both planning and policies, and strategies for their development. Researchers and students from several scientific disciplines – including international and public affairs, urban planning, public health, and economics – participated in the study, along with the Ruiru Municipal Council, land owners and other local collaborative partners. All information was then disseminated to all stakeholders. A first result of the collaboration was the creation of a physical development plan for Ruiru. “The process also resulted in increased appreciation on the part of the Kenya Ministry of Local Government for the need that all of the municipalities surrounding Nairobi have for similar landuse, transportation and infrastructure planning. We have also demonstrated the importance of involving all those who will be affected by development in planning, in order to achieve higher levels of participation and increase the chance of success when it comes to implementation,” says Elliott Sclar.

The importance of institutions

One of the lessons that Elliott Sclar has learned from the project is that there are often plenty of small projects in growing cities in developing countries that work locally but that are difficult to scale up. The question is, why? “We concluded that it is often a question of how local decision making takes place and how authorities work. We can present a multitude of solutions, but they won’t work unless they are locally driven and unless there is institutional infrastructure to support the process,” he says.
That is why one part of CSUD’s work concerns the question of access to information and how it is used. “We discovered that people in different offices sometimes sat on information and didn’t share. It was often difficult to get access to relevant information. So we are creating a digital map of all of Nairobi with detailed information that will be made available to all stakeholders on the internet.”

Results from the Centre are intended to be useful to both academics and local users, such as the Ruiru Municipal Council, stakeholder organizations, city and societal planners, architects, landscape architects, and others. “The challenge is not going in as experts and saying what should be done, but providing information and solutions that they can really use. That is why we have made an effort to start a dialogue between different kinds of experts, interest groups and decision makers at several levels in and around Nairobi,” says Elliott Sclar.

The close collaboration between academics and local actors, and the focus on disseminating knowledge, are what separate CSUD’s projects from much of the research that has previously been carried out in this field. “The questions that we are exploring are not new, but the way we approach them is, as are our efforts to determine what knowledge is specific and what is general. What can we learn from each other? We hope to be able to use specific knowledge from the Ruiru effort in combination with broader regional data in an effort to help create and implement a metropolitan Nairobi transport and land use plan; one that is environmentally sustainable and socially equitable,” says Sclar.

Photo: Periurban town of Ruiru. Source: Photo courtesy of Julie Touber, CSUD, 2005

2010