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URBAN PLANNING & DESIGN
PRINCIPLE 1: URBAN PLANNING AND DESIGN
TCWNN FOSTERS COMPREHENSIVE AND INTEGRATED PLANNING AND DEVELOPMENT
1. Urban planning and design are cornerstones of TCWNN. They enable cities to translate a common vision into action to optimize cities for human thriving and healthy ecological systems through spatial visioning and strategic planning, supported by policies, tools, institutional and participatory mechanisms, regulatory procedures, and implemented through adequate resource allocation and investment.
2. TCWNN coordinates sectoral policies and actions, dealing with economic development, mobility, housing, culture, biodiversity, energy, water and waste, within a comprehensive and coherent territorial framework. Roles and responsibilities between all stakeholders, while respecting the principle of subsidiarity, are clearly defined with resources allocated strategically, equitably, and around a common agenda.
3. TCWNN is a catalyst for sustainability planning across jurisdictions within the region it occupies. It actively seeks to coordinate and implement policies, make investments and take actions that retain local autonomy while building and enhancing regional cooperation. It actively seeks cross-sectoral coordination and cooperation and promotes mutually beneficial, resilient, and environmentally sound linkages between rural and urban areas and related actions for climate adaptation.
4. TCWNN encourages efficient and equitable development patterns that avoid and repair urban sprawl and preserve natural and cultural resources. It recommends reducing the need to expend energy for transporting goods and people, and to increase resiliency in the face of the increased threats posed by a changing climate, through appropriate clustering of housing, industries, services and educational institutions. It recommends inter-municipal cooperation to achieve economies of scale and agglomeration, optimize use of resources and prevent unhealthy competition among local authorities and other public agencies.
5. TCWNN uses a bottom up planning process ensuring participation from all stakeholders including civil society organizations, corporate entities, and across communities, ethnicities, age and gender identities.
6. TCWNN acknowledges the fast changing dynamics and unfolding multiple crises of the 21st century that require an increasing adaptability of cities to arising complex situations. Planning and design requires more than ever a sense of resilience and preparedness for extreme crisis circumstances.
PRIORITY ACTIONS
1. Revisit planning and design practices to address the evolving societal and environmental needs in terms of accessibility, walkability, mobility, energy and resources: increasing proximity, curtailing urban sprawl expansion to focusing on just urban renewal and infill development, reducing the urban-rural dichotomy to embrace a metropolitan and regional planning approach.
2. Re-orient the automobile-oriented, fossil fuel-dependent business model used in urban planning towards one focused on humans, walkability, quality of life, and affordability in city design and planning instruments.
3. Refocus urban planning and design practices to make better use of the natural capital by developing nature-based solutions, increasing the CO2 sequestration capacity of places, and focusing on improving micro-climates.
4. Encourage new urban planning regulations and incentives that focus on the use of nature-based solutions to bring green spaces back into cities, restoration of natural and working lands that surround and support human communities, while monitoring
the benefits that these can produce (health, environmental, social, cultural, aesthetic, etc.).
5. Introduce urban planning regulations to limit and prevent new land consumption.
6. Encourage the reuse of underused and abandoned spaces and buildings to limit the waste of resources and land resulting from new construction.