Bursa Metropolitan Municipality Local Agenda 21 has built an organic agriculture garden for its Children’s Council. Members of the Council which is consist of children between 10-16 ages, are learning about growing organic fruits and vegetables. This Project aims to enhance the environmental counciousness of the children. Educators from the Hurriyet Agriculture High School trained children in planting, watering, trimming, harvesting and about the benefits of organic agriculture. Children are p more...

For many people, buying a home is the most expensive purchase of their lives, and it requires a mortgage from the bank. But slum dwellers do not have access to formal credit for homes or home improvement. The Slum Upgrading Facility (SUF) Pilot Programme is designed to assist low income groups to mobilize formal credit for this purpose. The following article simplifies the somewhat complicated 'architecture' used to make this happen. The stories from country projects in the newsletter touch on a more...

Participatory Democracy at the local level. Latin America and the Caribbean is the most urbanised region of the developing regions of the world, with nearly three-quarters of the population currently living in cities, and this proportion expected to increase to 80% by 2020.l in Latin America and the Caribbean.

Africa enters the 21st century not only faced with the challenge of an unprecedented rapid rate of urbanisation, but also with an intensification of poverty among the urban population. Within the next two-and-a-half decades, Africa’s urban centres will become the dominant habitat of its population. While this unavoidable demographic shift has a historic potential of transforming cities into crucibles of development and engines of national growth, the prevalence of abject poverty impedes the ha more...

UN-HABITAT has announced that it had appointed a seasoned Special Advisor with global expertise to assist the Ugandan government and local authorities in the former Gulu conflict zone in northern Uganda. Mr. Peter Donde, a Kenyan national, is a veteran of special projects in Somalia, Sudan, Myanmar, Iraq, Indonesia, Tanzania and Kenya. Background - some 2 million people have been displaced in northern Uganda due to conflict and civil war. The majority have lived for decades in poor conditions in more...

Abuja President Umaru Musa Yar’ Adua of Nigeria warned African housing ministers that governments had to move beyond talking to action on the urgent task of delivering housing, utility services and pollution management.
He made the warning in remarks to 26 ministers and senior officials gathered in the Nigerian capital, Abuja, for the Second African Ministerial Conference on Housing and Urban Development (AMCHUD II) at the end of July. The meeting is a new regional forum backed by UN-HABIT more...

Year and Location: Aug 2005 –July 2007 Indonesia. Client: PBSI, Dutch Government. The objective of this two-year project is to strengthen the Urban and Regional Development Institute (URDI) as a institutional home for training, advisory services, dissemination of knowledge and research for urban management and regional development in Indonesia through: * Assisting URDI in becoming a centre of excellence in local governance and urban management capacity building; * Building capacity at URDI more...

Year and Location: 2003 - 2006, Philippines, Sri Lanka, Nigeria, Cuba, Egypt. Client: UN-HABITAT

The Sustainable Cities Programme (SCP) is a joint UN-HABITAT/UNEP capacity-building and institutional strengthening facility. SCP promotes and supports environmental governance. Since its launch in 1991, SCP has grown from a modest single UN-HABITAT initiative to a global multi-agency programme. The facility applies Agenda 21 principles to support implementation of the Habitat Agenda whilst buildi more...

Year and Location: Feb 2004 – Sep 2005, Bulgaria. Client: MATRA Fund. Transition in the Bulgarian housing sector has been drastic in the 1990's. Housing production is no longer solely a state affair. Private parties are also increasingly responsible for management and maintenance of the housing stock, yet for many home owners investment in maintenance has not become a habit. In multi family buildings apartment buildings technical problems are starting to become urgent particularly in the panel more...

Year and Location: May - July 2004, Macedonia, Albania, Montenegro, Serbia, Bosnia, Herzegovina, Croatia. Client: Stability Pact

Urban Solutions, together with PRC Bouwcentrum International and DIGH was assigned to carry out a number of fact finding missions to the Balkan countries to assess the need for establishing a regional training programme for housing policies and urban development. It was concluded that capacity building is needed urgently to deal with the following three problems: more...