- Efficient Urbanisation: Leveraging the City for Sustainability   231 kb by    Cerere, Njeri | cerere@gmail.com    Short Outline East Africa is one of the fastest urbanising regions in the world and is home to vast natural resources. This paper explores the opportunities presented by urbanisation and regional cooperation in sustainable management and creation of cities. Abstract East Africa is one of the fastest urbanising regions in the world and home to vast natural resources. In the developing world, urbanisation brings the promise of economic growth and development and along with it the threat of environmental degradation and socio-economic disparities. This inspires apprehension rather than anticipation in the developing world as rapid, unchecked, and unplanned urbanisation evolves as a precursor to the urban population predicted by current trends. Sprawl around cities and along emerging infrastructure grids coupled with lack of plans at regional, national and local levels imposes encroachment and the spill over effects of human activity into wildlife habitats, wetlands, forests and other environmentally valuable and sensitive areas. There also exist opportunities presented by well planned, efficient urbanisation mechanisms including: • Integrating and coordinating planning infrastructure, investment and land use plans on regional, national and local levels • Anticipating density in cities and managing sprawl beforehand by implementing efficient urban growth tools and incentives • Incorporating environmentally sustainable measures into future land use plans to transform and preserve outlying areas as urbanisation occurs • Activating the city’s potential as economic engines for growth and development to create opportunities that foster social sustainability • Leveraging the city’s opportunities for durable competitive advantage to effectively channel investment • Promoting liveable urban spaces by including the green agenda into current planning and building practices Efficient planning, investment and development have the potential to manage and reverse the negative impacts of unplanned rapid urbanisation. Current lessons and best practices from Latin America and Asia indicate that planning ahead to accommodate and cater for this explosive growth in cities is preferable to attempts at implementing urban upgrading systems and structures after the fact. Keywords sustainable development, liveability, regional development Case Study presented on the ISOCARP Congress 2011: LIVEABLE CITIES: URBANISING WORLD, Meeting the Challenge   Click to open the full paper as pdf document   Click to send an email to the author(s) of this paper