Urbayiti: A delegation from the Municipal Council of Port-au-Prince visits Paris and Marseille

Experience-sharing on urban management

Field visits and time for discussions with the services of the cities of Paris and Marseille aimed to build the capacities of the Municipal Council of Port-au-Prince through exchanges on specific themes:

• Territorial planning (urban renewal, housing, precarious neighbourhoods),

• Participatory governance,

• Relations with civil society,

• Resilience and solid waste management (policy, tools, implementation, etc.).

For example, the mission was able to visit the street cleaning school in Paris, the Batignolles eco-neighbourhood, the Paris Urban Planning Agency (APUR), the incineration plant of SYCTOM – the metropolitan agency for household waste management – in Issy-les-Moulineaux, the Department of Participatory Democracy, Citizens and Territories and Participatory Budgeting of the City of Paris, the Resilience Mission of the City of Paris, the urban planning agency of Greater Marseille (AGAM), and the Euro-Mediterranean project.

The latter, which is still ongoing, is undoubtedly the successful experience which marked the delegation the most by its scale, the similarity with Port-au-Prince in terms of the problems it is trying to resolve and the institutional set-up adopted.

All these meetings were very instructive and allowed useful contacts to be established, which need to be built on to ensure that the outcomes of this mission are sustainable.

Development of decentralised cooperation

Thanks to the presence of the Mayor and the Director of External Relations of the Municipal Council of Port-au-Prince, the mission also provided a good opportunity to strengthen the City of Port-au-Prince as the capital city of Haiti and to consider establishing decentralised cooperation with the City of Paris on the themes of waste management, urban resilience, citizen participation and metropolitan governance.

Furthermore, serious possibilities for cooperation emerged for technical assistance for the management of urban development operations by the Municipal Council of Port-au-Prince by AGAM and the Euro-Mediterranean management structure.

Financed by the European Union and implemented by Expertise France, the Urbayiti project aims to promote the economic and social development of Haiti and contribute to the resilience of populations by improving the management and quality of life of cities. The first phase of the programme mainly concerns the renewal of the institutional framework at the national, regional and local levels, in order to strengthen the governance of the sector and improve the management and planning of cities.

Find out about the Urbayiti project