Organized by World Bank Tokyo Development Learning Center (TDLC) in collaboration with Inclusive City Knowledge Silo-Breaker (KSB)
Well-designed urban places and spaces can serve as catalysts for creating vibrant, livable, inclusive, and productive cities. Citizens play a critical role in advocating and helping to make such space more vibrant, accountable, and effective, and contributing to innovative ways of using urban spaces.
Pioneered by the City of Yokohama, the second-largest city in Japan, the Yokohama Urban Design Sketchbook (YUDS) is a citizen engagement and co-creation methodology for urban design at the neighborhood level. It leverages cross-sectional sketches and drawings to translate citizens’ visions and ideas of urban areas into concrete proposals of urban design. YUDS also fosters interest in urban areas, and it enhances community engagement in broader urban planning and municipal processes. Based on the experience of Yokohama City, the YUDS methodology has been successfully piloted and tested in two distinct urban contexts: in Panama City, Panama, in April 2019, and in Barranquilla, Colombia, in February 2020.
Against this background, the World Bank Tokyo Development Learning Center (TDLC) has recently published the which summarizes the YUDS method and lessons from applying the model to developing countries. To commemorate the publication of this guidebook, TDLC organized this event. While looking back on the history of urban development in Yokohama over the past 50 years, the event discussed the achievements and significance of participatory urban design illustrated by YUDS and its applicability in developing countries. It also introduced a cross-sectional sketch–a simple yet powerful tool that may overcome communication barriers and build consensus among participants regardless of their language, age group, or social position.
Recording
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