July, 2010
New Co-op
During the first week of July, Alison Prier, the new Northeastern University Co-op will begin her six month internship at IIUD. Alison is pursuing a Bachelor of Arts in Political Science and an interdisciplinary minor in Environmental Economics at Northeastern. Her interests focus on sustainable development in transportation and energy sectors in developing countries. Alison has recently returned from Ireland, where she served as a Parliamentary Intern and gained experience completing legislative research and composing legal briefs.
July, 2010
Connecting People and Opportunities: University of Hawaii---IIUD Board Member---IIUD Cambridge----ICLRD Armagh---Queen’s University Belfast
Janine Clifford, one of the first Board members of the Institute, lives and practices in Hawaii (http://i2ud.org/Pages/clifford.html). She is also teaching in the graduate program at the University Of Hawaii School of Architecture. One of Janine’s students, Takara Tada, is a PhD candidate interested in studying conflict resolution and the capacity of the built environment to inform reconciliation efforts. Around St Patrick’s Day Janine was in touch with the Institute to ask if we could suggest an organization where Takara could undertake a semester long practicum. Through our ICLRD program and Irish activities, we were able to connect Takara to Karen Keaveney, a lecturer at Queens University in Belfast. Tarka now has a fall 2010 semester placement at the Institute of Spatial and Environmental Planning in the School of Planning, Architecture and Civil Engineering at Queen’s University Belfast. The Belfast connection is very appropriate given that Tarka has selected three cities she wants to focus on in her research: Belfast, Beirut and Nicosia. We very much appreciate Karen’s assistance in finding a placement for Takara. In 2008, Karen was able to use her own research funding to come to Cambridge where we gave her a home base for three months to undertake research on US planning practices. We fondly refer to her as our first visiting scholar. Karen returned to the Institute in 2009 and continues to stay in touch and is actively involved in various ICLRD research and training initiatives.
July, 2010
Institute/ICLRD Linkages with the Joint Center for Housing Studies continues in 2010
John Driscoll was reappointed as an affiliate of the Harvard University Joint Center for Housing Studies for the academic year 2010. The Joint Center has been very supportive of our work in Ireland and has hosted academic exchanges with ICLRD partners and co-sponsored events with the Institute. In 2009, the Institute and the Joint Center organized a seminar at the Graduate School of Design with Minister Conor Murphy of the Department of Regional Development in Northern Ireland.
July, 2010
Technical Assistance to the Municipal Government of Mutare, Zimbabwe
Working in tandem with KV3 Engineers from Pretoria, South Africa, the IIUD team is providing technical assistance to the Municipal Government of Mutare, Zimbabwe. Zimbabwe has been through two traumatizing civil wars, hyperinflation, economic collapse, and relatively recent “dollarization” of the economy. Medium- to large-scale industries have stopped operations and/or ceased investments because of the uneasy political climate and unreliable infrastructural services, particularly provision of electricity. Once being the breadbasket of southern Africa, Zimbabwe’s farm production has ground to a halt. Mutare, located on Zimbabwe’s eastern frontier with Mozambique, is nevertheless poised to attempt a recovery. Biorn Maybury-Lewis—following up on Mona Serageldin’s visit to the area earlier this year—joined Senior KV3 Administrator and Engineer Richard Kruger as well as KV3 Environmental Officer François Humphries on a data gathering mission there in the week of June 1, 2010. The team met with municipal authorities and senior planners and organized focus group encounters with citizens and leaders of three of Mutare’s poorest urban neighborhoods: Sakubva, Dangamvura, and Hobhouse. The major challenges facing the community are unemployment and overcrowded housing, along with electrical, water, and sewerage infrastructural problems. Informants agreed that the top priority is employment generation through support of small businesses. The immediate solution is the creation of places to work. Every neighborhood wants the municipal government to provide a marketplace with a roof and workspace floor, proper drainage, bathrooms, lighting, storage facilities, security, and regular waste removal. Within these new urban market/business spaces, small businesses and traders could then install themselves, hire, generate surpluses, and begin locally Zimbabwe’s recovery.
July, 2010
Strategic Planning in Arusha, Tanzania
The IIUD staff continues to provide technical assistance to the Regional Commissioner and his Task Force in Arusha, Tanzania. Following up on the IIUD field work in 2009 and early 2010, Biorn Maybury-Lewis and Caroline Jordi recently revisited Arusha. Biorn completed meetings with the remaining eight ward leadership teams during the week of June 7, 2010. He discussed with each the prospects and challenges for development in the region. It emerged that despite the important new university, public sector, and private sector construction and business initiatives underway (or about to be), many of Arusha’s urban poor are still not benefiting. A consensus emerged that regional government and multi-lateral support for employment generation actions, particularly for small businesses, infrastructure improvements, health care clinics, the environment (improved trash collection, especially), as well as primary education would best serve the community’s interest in the near term. Caroline documented land use in important development nodes and collected data on the new township boundaries and the new annexed municipal areas. Based on this information and previously collected data, the IIUD staff is developing an action plan for the region. Mona Serageldin will travel to Arusha in late July to present the plan and discuss it with key stakeholders in the community.
June, 2010
Technical Assistance to Ladysmith/Emnambithi Local Municipality
IIUD is continuing its technical assistance to the Ladysmith/Emnambithi Municipality in South Africa by preparing a regeneration plan for Ezakheni Township. In April, the IIUD/KV3 project team submitted an interim report to the Municipality, which focused on key planning issues and outlined the draft urban design framework for Ezakheni. Currently, we are developing schemes for the selected priority projects that are part of the regeneration strategy as well as preparing the draft final report and presentation.
June, 2010
Summer Intern
Janaki Kibe began her summer internship at IIUD in early June. Janaki is pursuing a master’s in Urban Planning at the Harvard Graduate School of Design and has just completed her first year. Having grown up in Washington, D.C. and Istanbul, Turkey, she graduated from Harvard College in 2008 with a B.A. in Economics. Prior to her graduate studies, Janaki worked for Cambridge Associates in Boston. Her academic interests center on international development and affordable housing. At the Institute, Janaki is currently involved in mapping and urban design work for the regeneration strategy for Ezakheni Township, Ladysmith, South Africa.
April, 2010
World Urban Forum, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil
Mona Serageldin and Biorn Maybury-Lewis Attend Three Urban Development Meetings in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil in March 2010
Between March 22 and 26, 2010, Mona Serageldin and Biorn Maybury-Lewis attended the Fifth World Urban Forum of the United Nations in Rio de Janeiro where 14,000 representatives of governments and non-governmental organizations, from around the world, gathered to discuss the world’s major urban development issues. Mona was a featured speaker during the day-long Dialogue 4 on cities and cultural diversity. Her comments as a panelist are posted on the Institute’s web site. Dialogue 4 was an interesting and stimulating event. It was extremely well attended in the large auditorium space and the discussions were animated. It was considered the most successful event of the Forum. Meanwhile, Biorn was invited to contribute, both as an IIUD researcher and university professor, at the roundtable on the University and Urban Development attended by over 200 representatives from universities around the world. His remarks were applauded when he advocated the need to better familiarize our students with developing countries through language training, historical and geographical understanding, cultural studies, and experiential and service learning opportunities. The challenge, he argued, is to relate university knowledge more effectively to those who need it most in the process of urban development.
Mona and Biorn also attended the meeting of the Global Urban Development (GUD) network on Friday, March 26 which includes prominent specialists in urban development issues from Argentina, Australia, Brazil, India, the People’s Republic of China, Tanzania, the U.K., and the U.S. GUD Chairman and CEO Mark Weiss launched a discussion on how most of the world’s peoples live in cities, and that GUD was looking to cities as the source of solutions to the world’s pressing development issues; not as the root of the planet’s problems. The implications of climate change are now the GUD’s main preoccupation.
Finally, on the weekend of March 27-28, Mona and Biorn participated in the U.N. Habitat Best Practices local leadership steering committee meeting hosted by Marlene Fernandes of Rio de Janeiro’s Brazilian Institute for Municipal Administration (IBAM). IIUD is a founding member of the Best Practices Program since its 1996 inception and took the opportunity to introduce Biorn to the group which includes leaders of institutions from around the globe. The Best Practices committee moved to update, improve, and make more accessible to the public the search engine of the Best Practices Archive, now a considerable resource with 3000 cases of which about 200 have received a Dubai Award. The Sixth World Urban Forum meeting will be held in Bahrain in 2012.April, 2010
State of the North African Cities
In April 2010, Mona Serageldin, Frank Vigier and Kendra Leith completed the first drafts of the State of the North African Cities report and a paper on urban land markets in North Africa for UN-HABITAT. With feedback from UN-HABITAT, they will continue to revise the papers and submit the final drafts in the coming months. The reports will be presented as part of The State of African Cities 2010: Governance, Inequality and the Economies of African Cities.
April, 2010
Technical Assistance to Ladysmith/Emnambithi Local Municipality
IIUD is collaborating with KV3 Engineers in South Africa to provide the Ladysmith/Emnambithi Local Municipality with technical assistance to prepare a regeneration plan for Ezakheni, an economically distressed township in Ladysmith. Located 3 ½ hours south-east of Johannesburg, Ladysmith is the administrative and industrial center of the Uthukela District Municipality in KwaZulu Natal. As part of the regeneration plan, IIUD will develop an urban design framework and identify key development projects to be considered for funding.
Mona Serageldin and Alejandra Mortarini traveled to South Africa in mid-February to begin initial fieldwork with the local KV3 team, which included a three day site visit to Ezakheni. The information gathering and site investigation allowed the team to begin developing the planning strategies and potential priority projects for the regeneration plan.
During the second visit to South Africa in March, Natalie Pohlman and Alejandra Mortarini worked with the local team to prepare a presentation for the Municipal Council meeting on March 12th. A workshop was held the day prior to this meeting for selected municipal officials to hear a preliminary presentation by the IIUD/KV3 project team on the draft urban design framework. They had an in-depth discussion with the team about the proposed planning strategies as well as other important issues needing attention in the township. The following day, the project team presented the draft urban design framework strategy at the official full council meeting, attended by all the relevant officials of Ladysmith/Emnambithi Municipality including the Ward Councilors.January, 2010
Strategic Planning in Arusha, Tanzania
We are continuing our technical assistance to the regional, district and local authorities of Arusha by preparing a development framework and action plan. Mona Serageldin and Biorn Maybury-Lewis traveled to Arusha in January, joined by our partners from KV3 Engineering, to meet and discuss our recent work with the Regional Commissioner, the local Task Force, and Mr. Nasir Peerani of the Aga Khan University. As part of our field work and documentation, Biorn met with the village councils in Olturumet and Mateves, two important areas whose development has a direct impact on the AKU campus site.
January, 2010
Periphery of Arusha, Tanzania
Biorn Maybury-Lewis spent a week meeting with five village councils at Ekenywa, Ilkiushin, Mateves village, Lemgur, and Ngorobob, to the north and northwest of the city of Arusha. In the coming years, the construction of the Nairobi ring-road extension and of the Aga Khan University campus will create strong development pressures in both of these areas. Without planning, this could easily lead to chaotic urbanization of the urban periphery of Arusha as has happened in many similar circumstances around the developing world. Urbanization, for the rural poor, is not always positive, as they risk losing their land haphazardly as well as their community integrity.
Both Olturumet and Mateves are still largely rural, the population involved in sedentary farming, with limited technology, and the raising of cattle and goats. They suffer a severe lack of water and women, traditionally responsible for supplying their families with water, are obliged to walk anywhere from 4 to 14 kilometers daily to the community water spigots where they fill 20 liter buckets of water and carry them home on their heads. The road infrastructure is truly precarious. There is no electrification in these two regions except near the main Arusha-Dodoma highway.
Despite these infrastructural challenges, every single village council gave priority to the improvement of their schools. None of the schools have electricity or adequate toilet facilities and most have no running water. Class sizes are well above the standard Tanzanian ratio of forty-five students per teacher. When asked “Why is education so important to you when challenged with serious and fundamental problems such as lack of water?” they invariably replied that “With education, we can resolve all of our other problems. That’s why we think it is so much more important than anything else.”
The completion of the Nairobi ring-road and the Aga Khan University will improve the economic outlook of the two regions. The challenge will be to avoid the pitfalls of chaotic development and allow the villages to take advantage of the coming changes while safeguarding their community and cultural integrity.
January, 2010
State of African Cities
We are continuing our work on the documentation of inequalities, bridging the urban divide, and the nature of urban land markets North African cities. Mona Serageldin, Frank Vigier, and Kendra Leith will complete the report with help from Caroline Jordi and Owen Maguire by the spring of 2010. It will be presented as part of The State of African Cities 2010: Governance, Inequality and the Economies of African Cities.
January, 2010
Fifth Annual ICLRD Conference
The annual conference of the International Centre for Local and Regional Development (ICLRD) took place on January 21st and 22nd in the Killyhevlin Hotel, Enniskillen. This year’s conference, Preparing for Economic Recovery: Planning Ireland, North and South, out of Recession, considered strategies for economic recovery and long-term sustainable growth in the island of Ireland, with a particular focus on spatial planning responses to the current crisis. The invited speakers included policy experts and decision-makers from local, regional and national government, academia and the business sector, including Declan Kelly, US Economic Envoy to Northern Ireland and speakers from outside the island of Ireland who offered an international perspective to the conference.
October, 2009
Board Meeting in Egypt
The IIUD October 2009 Board meeting was held in Cairo and Alexandria, Egypt. The Board had the opportunity to meet with senior public officials and private sector representatives to discuss a range of topics including: long-term urban planning for the greater Cairo region; the provision of affordable housing for moderate and lower income families; growth encouragement in the technology sector; and the preservation of Cairo and Alexandria’s cultural, natural and architectural heritage.
Meetings with senior public officials focused on central and local government urban initiatives to provide services, jobs, and housing for Egypt’s growing urban and rural populations. In Cairo, staff and board members met with H.E. Dr. Abd el-Azim Wazir (Deputy Governor of Cairo), H.E. Eng Ahmed El-Maghrabi (Minister of Housing, Utilities and New Communities) and Dr. Sami Saad Zaghloul (Secretary of the Council of Ministers). Dr. Mustafa Madbuli, Director General of the Organization for Physical Planning, Ministry of Housing, Utilities and New Communities, gave an excellent presentation on Cairo: 2050 and the planning challenges of managing a mega city such as the greater Cairo region.
In addition, staff and board members were taken on several guided tours of Cairo’s historic landmarks and current urban projects, including the Historic Center Renovation and Old Cairo (Babylon) Renovation projects. They also visited Orascom Housing Communities, Egypt’s largest private sector housing project, which is being developed by ORASCOM Hotels and Development, the largest real estate development company in Egypt. The firm’s managing director Eng. Omar El-Hitam led the tour. Later, the Board was able to discuss the projects with Chairman and CEO Mr. Samir Sawiris. The Board also had an opportunity to visit Egypt’s new technology initiative, Smart Villages Co., and receive a briefing by Eng. Abd el-Ghafar.
The last day of the trip was spent in Alexandria, where the IIUD staff and board members were greeted by H.E. General Adel Labib, Governor of Alexandria, and were given a tour of the city’s key sites by Dr. Mohamed Awad. The final visit, which was very extensive and a highlights of the trip, was of the Bibliotheca Alexandrina with Dr. Ismail Serageldin, Board member and Director of the Bibliotheca. The Board was very impressed by the building as well as the breadth of the programs at the library.
Thanks to our gracious hosts in Cairo and Alexandria as well as to the Institute staff who helped with the planning. Despite the busy and complex schedule, the October 2009 IIUD Board Meeting was very successful and enjoyed by all.
See more photos of the Board's trip to Egypt.
June 2009
Serageldin presents climate change paper at Urban Research Symposium
On Sunday, June 28th, Mona Serageldin presented findings from a paper at the World Bank’s Fifth Urban Research Symposium in
June 2009
IIUD welcomes Gary Haney to its Board
Gary Haney, Design Partner at Skidmore, Owings & Merrill LLP,
May 27, 2009
Irish President Visits IIUD
Irish President Mary McAleese, her husband Dr. Martin McAleese, and a team of delegates visited with IIUD staff, affiliates and board members at Chairman of the Board Ted Raymond’s office in Boston on Tuesday, May 26, 2009. John Driscoll, founding Director for the International Centre for Local and Regional Development (ICLRD) and IIUD Vice President, spoke about ICLRD’s current and future work, while Frank Vigier, IIUD President, detailed the history of the organization’s founding and his hope’s for exporting the Irish reconciliation model to other conflict areas. President McAleese talked about the impacts of the border, physical and mental, on the different communities on the island of Ireland and thanked IIUD for its continuing work and role in starting ICLRD.
Over the past eight years, IIUD has been actively promoting cross-border cooperation on the Island of Ireland as part of the reconciliation process that followed the Good Friday Agreement. It is a founding partner of ICLRD based in Armagh (Northern Ireland), a joint venture between the Institute, the National Institute for Regional and Spatial Analysis at the University of Ireland (Maynooth), the Built Environment Research Institute at the University of Ulster, the Athlone Institute of Technology and the Center for Cross Border Studies in Armagh.
Article on the visit in the Boston Globe
April 2009
Strategic Planning in Arusha (Tanzania)
Mona Serageldin and Richard Kruger travelled to Arusha (
April 2009
IIUD welcomes Cathy Simon to its Board
Cathy Simon, Principal at Perkins + Will, San Francisco,
March 2009
Technical assistance to Sedibeng District Municipality, South Africa
IIUD is working with KV3 engineers in South Africa to provide technical assistance to the Sedibeng District Municipality and the Local Municipality of Emfuleni, about one hour outside of Pretoria, to prepare plans to integrate and upgrade three to four established townships in the area housing a large number of low-income residents. Key elements of this project include:
- Identifying and designing corridors and hubs for economic, social, and government activities;
- Creating plans for upgrading of roads and pedestrian areas;
- Formulating open space plans;
- Developing a strategy to preserve and valorize local historic sites; and
- Creating an environmental management plan.
IIUD is engaging community residents in all aspects of the project by conducting meetings with key stakeholders, including community leaders, business owners, ward committees and local groups active in the townships. Stakeholders’ viewpoints will be instrumental in the formulation of neighborhood development strategies. Mona Serageldin, Alejandra Mortarini and Christa Lee-Chuvala traveled to South Africa in March to visit the sites, begin to work with the local team and hold community meetings.
March 22, 2009
UN-HABITAT 22nd Governing Council
Mona Serageldin attended the 22nd Governing Council of UN-HABITAT held at the agency’s headquarters in Nairobi, Kenya. She was invited to participate in a Special Dialogue on Investing in Youth-Led Development opened by the Director of UN-HABITAT, Ms. Anna Tibaijuka. The Dialogue discussed HABITAT’s new Opportunities Fund for Urban Youth-Led Development, an initiative that will provide small-scale grants to grassroots youth-led organizations around the world to demonstrate the value of investing in and engaging youth to promote development.
February 2009
Housing Sustainability Study
John Driscoll, Erick Guerra and Paddy Gray (University of Ulster) visited several housing estates in Ireland and Northern Ireland last January. In addition to documenting the sites and collecting research materials, they met with local government officials, community organizers, real estate developers and residents. A final report of the findings of the ongoing research project related to this visit will be produced over the next several months. The report will document and analyze recent revitalization and community programs at four public housing estates – two in Ireland and two in Northern Ireland – that were constructed in the late 1970s. The focus of the study is the way in which communities can respond to and prevent outbreaks of sectarian and racist violence, as well as other social problems, with a view to promoting socially sustainable and mixed communities.
The study then looks at two emerging approaches to develop new communities that are socially, ethnically and racially diverse. Carran Crescent, a 20-unit publicly led development in Enniskillen Town (Fermanagh District Council, Northern Ireland), is branded as the first socially integrated housing scheme in Northern Ireland and was the winner of the national UK Housing Award’s ‘Outstanding Achievement Award’ in 2007, jointly held by the Chartered Institute of Housing and Inside Housing. In the Republic of Ireland, Adamstown, the planned 10,000-unit private development on the Dublin ring road, takes a different approach by promoting mixed communities through affordability requirements. Yet challenges remain at both developments – Carran Crescent is a conservative and small scale intervention in an already peaceful and mixed estate and Adamstown’s private approach, based on strong housing demand, looks unfeasible in today’s economy – emphasize the challenges of building and managing affordable housing in general but also of using public housing policy to address wider social issues.
January, 2009
Climate Change Study for 5th Urban Symposium
IIUD staff members have been selected to prepare a paper on climate change for the World Bank's 5th Urban Symposium, "Cities and Climate Change: Responding to an Urgent Agenda", which will be held in Marseilles, France from June 28th to 30th. Our paper proposes to investigate the likely impacts of climate change and public policy in two coastal cities, Cotonou (Benin) and Alexandria (Egypt). Because of the long time frame of the predicted disasters, neither city considers building resilience to climate change as a priority deserving the same attention as enhancing economic competitiveness, improving infrastructure, and urban services, and absorbing population growth. Egypt has instituted measures to mitigate impacts on agriculture in the coastal region of the Nile delta and Benin has outlawed removal of sand from beaches and is considering building a seawall along the coast. Yet little has been done to address the impacts of climate change at the city level, despite the economic importance of both cities.
January, 2009
Fourth Annual ICLRD Conference
The annual conference of the International Centre for Local and Regional Development (ICLRD) will take place on 22-23 January 2009 in the Radisson SAS Hotel, Letterkenny, County Donegal. Now in its fourth year, the annual ICLRD conferences are growing in reputation and, with regard to the themes of spatial planning, community development, inter-jurisdictional collaboration and economic growth and development, they are now considered as leading forums and spaces for debate, networking and learning. IIUD is a founding partner of ICLRD, whose Director, John Driscoll, is a Vice President at the Institute. Visit the ICLRD website for more details.
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