Critical elements in sustaining participatory planning: Bagamoyo strategic urban development planning framework in Tanzania

Abstract

Worldwide, generally, and in Tanzania, particularly, urban development planning has in the 1990s become participatory and strategic and less technocratic and comprehensive. The shift has involved the preparation and implementation of general planning schemes rather than detail planning schemes. Inability to sustain technocratic and comprehensive urban planning, which is widely published, has prompted the shift to participatory and strategic urban planning. This latest approach to urban development planning also needs to be sustained. Based on the Tanzanian experience, in general, and 2001 Bagamoyo Strategic Urban Development Planning Framework (SUDPF), in particular, there are critical elements in sustaining the participatory and strategic urban development planning process. They include scope of and approach to urban development planning, form of urban development planning team, resource mobilization for SUDPF implementation, problem solving and conflict resolving by the SUDPF process, and SUDPF implementing team and institutional arrangements. These critical elements are examined in detail basing on lessons of experience from Bagamoyo in Tanzania. Sustaining the SUDPF process entails problem solving and conflict resolution by executing bankable projects and operating a flexible land-use regulatory framework. The process of citywide planning has to set a dynamic coordinating framework for executing development decisions that are made each day by city stakeholders, as opposed to a static controlling blueprint of development that is manifest in control planning.