- ‘Think globally, act locally’: North and South working together on a sustainable urban development strategy. Experiences from: Citylink Antwerp - Paramaribo    551 kb by    Heirman, Sigrid | sigrid.heirman@stad.antwerpen.be    Short Outline A case study guiding the search for the content and the meaning of the premise 'Think globally, act locally' with reference to urban sprawl and the need for sustainable urban growth. Abstract In a globalised world, nations fade and cities become more important. The urban tissue has changed dramatically over the last two centuries. The rural drift has caused a worldwide city growth, followed by sub urbanisation where rural areas around the cities became more urbanised and the city centres suffered from decline. This type of urbanism created environmental awareness and a realisation that these cities didn’t lead to a sustainable future. Since the conference of Rio in 1992, there is a global goal for sustainable urban growth. Despite the global character of urban sprawl and the global dimension of sustainable growth, it is not possible to formulate a global practice that is healing for all cities around the world. The gap between north and south is still huge. In addition the many regional differences make it necessary for every process in planning to demand a specific and local adaptation to the general concept of urban growth. This contributes to what Agenda 21 poses by ‘ Think globally, act locally’. The paper will use a case to discover what the content and meaning of this premise can be. The ‘Citylink Antwerp – Paramaribo’ has an urban development program which contains a project about the urban fringe of Paramaribo, capital of Surinam. The project focussed on the similarities and differences of the planning environment and practice in both cities. This analysis led to an explorative, area specific process, that was based on the principles of strategic planning and aimed for a vision about the sustainable growth for a part of the fringe. A research based on literature about global, regional and local development strategies, supported the experiences of the case to form a development strategy, making it possible to start the implementation of the vision and supporting new projects in the fringe to launch. In conclusion the case makes it possible to decide what the content and the meaning of ‘think globally, act locally’ was for the case of Paramaribo. Keywords Development strategies dealing with glocal identities of cities Case Study presented on the ISOCARP Congress 2007: Urban Trialogues   Click to open the full paper as pdf document   Click to send an email to the author(s) of this paper