Redefine the development of highly dynamic cities

These predictions originate in the 2014 Revision of the World ‪#‎Urbanization‬Prospects by the ‪#‎UN‬ Population Division and show clearly that one mayor challenge of the 21 century is the development of highly dynamic cities especially in ‪#‎Africa‬ and ‪#‎Asia‬. Those cities are already in a state where they have to tackle dynamic changes in the needs of sectors like water and energy provision, waste management and numerous sectors more. This is where ‪#‎rapidplanning‬ comes to action. The basic idea of our project is to provide a tool that integrates those separate sectors that drive a city and to identify the relations and dependencies between those sectors to display a holistic system of the city with an up-to-date dataset. With such a tool a city is best placed to identify its needs and developments and is able to do rapid and sustainable planning decisions. We understand cities as highly complex systems and therefore we set up our research team with more than 30 experienced professional researchers from different Universities and profound experts in their respective sector. By creating the synergy of this joint trans-sectoral research team supported by ‪#‎UNHabitat‬ we are capable to link these sectors and develop a visionary rapid trans-sectoral urban planning methodology. Our approach strives to take advantage of potential synergies when linking these sectors of infrastructure such as water, waste water, waste, energy and urban agriculture/food systems all together.

A mayor challenge for us, is to provide the usability of our tool for cities in Asia and Africa at the same time. Therefore the Rapid Planning methodology will be developed in the project case cities Da Nang (Vietnam), Kigali (Ruanda) and (Assiut (Egypt). Reference city is Frankfurt (Main) Germany.

"Rapid Planning has very successfully started in Da Nang due to the strong commitment of the local project partners and the city administration. We had very fruitful discussions between the local and German experts of the project team and have already started practical work” Mr. Dieter Steinbach project coordinator of Rapid Planning emphasized.

Our transdisciplinary team of geographers, urban planners and experts for technical infrastructure, which are currently staying in Da Nang is working on data collection, mapping, stakeholder analysis and analysis of the technical supply and disposal infrastructure. Vietnamese project partners are actively supporting this work. A survey for data collection is done by a Vietnamese/German team of students from the Da Nang University and German team members. A practical entry project was developed by persons responsible of Cam Le district and German team members and can be rapidly getting off the ground.