UN Habitat’s New Urban Planning Agenda Launched in Belize

Belize is the first Central American country to adapt U.N. Habitat’s Our City Plans tool kit. This morning, the Ministry of Local Government, in collaboration with U.N. Habitat, launched a program that will see urban planners strengthen their technical capacity for the organization of better human settlements in Belize. An official ceremony was held in Belize City this morning to introduce the tool kit to urban planners. Here is more from that event.

Oscar Requeña

Oscar Requeña, Minister of Local Government

“Today we are very happy to be participating in the launch of UN Habitat. This forum provides an opportunity for city planners or urban planners really to participate in a training in which they are going to be exposed to a very participatory toolkit that UN habitat is promoting to be able to make urban planning, more sustainable with a focus on resiliency, climate resiliency and mitigation to disaster risks. As a country, we have not been very good planners, and that’s the truth. You know, we certainly need to do better in how we plan our urban spaces. A lot of times, municipalities popping up all over the place, without proper infrastructure, without having access to land, being able to know where the streets are going to be, how they’re going to move around, how they’re going to grow their community. So certainly, we need to move away from this. And the whole idea of this forum really is to expose our city planners, our municipal planners to strategies and a toolkit that is going to be participatory and engaging.”

Eugenia De Grazia

Eugenia De Grazia, Program Officer, UN Habitat

“We started with a virtual process of capacity building and today with the first capacity building session. Also, we are contributing and working together with you in the collaboration of technical analysis of the territorial and urban context for Belize. We are right now working on the elaboration of the data base with the inventory of informal settlements of some cities in Central America region.”