The Prince's Foundation launches new website for the Rapid Planning Toolkit

On World Town Planning Day (Sunday 8th November 2020), The Prince’s Foundation launched the new website for the Rapid Planning Toolkit for Urban Expansion.

The Rapid Planning Toolkit is a simple and practical tool designed to assist city leaders and built environment practitioners in creating sustainable cities. The Toolkit contains a four-step process that looks to harness participatory planning processes to rapidly implement walkable neighbourhoods on the periphery of rapidly growing secondary cities.

At a time when the world’s urban population is set to increase dramatically in the next three decades, with most of this rapid urbanisation occurring in towns and cities of less than one million inhabitants, there has never been a more important moment to raise planning up the political spectrum, help build capacity and take rapid action to address this challenge. The speed and scale of growth means that managing urban areas, and planning for new sustainable urban extensions, will be one of the most important challenges facing cities and societies in the 21st century. The Rapid Planning Toolkit is one solution to this challenge.

The Rapid Planning Toolkit website provides an overview of the Toolkit, summarising the four-step process to creating an urban expansion plan. It is designed to give an initial understanding of the steps involved. More extended and detailed steps, together with a training structure to support it, will be available for those seeking to use the Toolkit in their city in due course. The website hosts a Resource Hub of material complementary to the Rapid Planning Toolkit, a page on how the Toolkit can be used to meet the UN2030 Sustainable Development Goals, a page outlining the partners that we are working with, details on how to contact us and more.

The website also includes a case study example of the work undertaken by The Prince’s Foundation so far in Bo, Sierra Leone. Bo has successfully completed three of the four steps in the Toolkit in just six months, with 670 trees planted in their first neighbourhood. The tree planting ceremony held on the 23rd July was attended by over 300 people including high-level stakeholders from local government. Plans are underway to create demonstration buildings in Bo next year, in the centre of the newly planned neighbourhood using the Rapid Planning Toolkit approach and methodology.

To find out more about the Rapid Planning Toolkit head to the new website at http://www.rapidplanningtoolkit.org/