Dr. Ir. Luc Boerboom and others depending on your interest.
Participatory Planning 1 and 2
You could combine with an internship at respective locations with UN-Habitat and/or local governments, for instance to test the results of your work. Thereby you could make more of your research fieldwork too.
A substantial number of countries have developed a National Urban Policy and aim to implement the New Urban Agenda. The United Nations, and particularly UN-Habitat, support countries in doing so. The challenge is to relate all these national policy intentions to local actions, through development of a shared and comparative understanding of the territory, increase of resource availability in civil society and public administration, and smart resource allocation strategy. The idea is to understand the whole territory to form well connected networks of specialized yet interdependent settlements.
Since 8 years, ITC and the Regional Office for Africa of UN-Habitat have been developing the Spatial Development Framework methodology for strategic urban planning in regional context in Sudan (Darfur) and Rwanda with additional implementations in Mozambique, Angola, Myanmar and Laos. On the one hand it has proven itself and UN-Habitat is making the SDF methodology one of the global tools of its Urban Lab. However, it is used in different contexts and needs further development both methodologically and technically. In Rwanda you could focus on participatory local economic and physical planning with a new spatial design and decision room of the Ministry of Infrastructure in the framework of an Enabel funded project. In Ethiopia you could for instance look at regional industrial development planning approaches. In Kenya the SDF method needs adaptation to include seascape functions (in collaboration with UNEP) settlement network functions for environmentally sustainable economic development.
So both methods and geo-spatial technologies could be developed. Come and share your interest and lets’ see how to make an interesting research topic about regional planning and development for settlement synergies.
Possible objectives and methodology, depending on your interest:
- Adapt spatial and economic planning methods for industrialization or coastal zone development
- Develop collaborative spatial planning and decision support (SPDSS) technologies
- Study institutionalization of SPDSS
Spaliviero, M., L. Boerboom, M. Gibert, G. Spaliviero & M. Bajaj (2019) The Spatial Development Framework to facilitate urban management in countries with weak planning systems. International Planning Studies, 24, 235-254. https://doi.org/10.1080/13563475.2019.1658571
Mutuku, B., L. Boerboom & A. M. Madureira (2019) The role of Planning Support Systems in national policy transfer and policy translation in secondary cities. International Planning Studies, 24, 293-307. https://doi.org/10.1080/13563475.2019.1657809