The 30th KLRTC Workshop was jointly organized by CityNet, UN-Habitat and the Kuala Lumpur Regional Training Centre from September 7-9, 2015. Staged by Kuala Lumpur City Hall, this year’s workshop was specifically designed for urban practitioners and decision makers from rapidly growing contexts and offered new tools for sustainable planning and an opportunity to strategize for a new urban agenda.

With limited resources, a fast changing urban landscape and short political cycles, however, harnessing the benefits of urbanization can be a difficult task. This short course gets urban actors asking the right questions about land use in their city, bridges the technical and policy dimensions of urban planning, and emphasizes a people-centered approach to decision making.

Attended by 21 participants from nine countries, the workshop was based on UN-Habitat’s unique publication “Urban Planning for City Leaders” launched in 2013 and has been greatly received and applied in Malaysia, Vietnam, Nigeria, Rwanda, Somalia, Kenya, Mexico, Saint Lucia and the Philippines. Some of the modules were Sustainable Urban Pattern and New Urban Agenda, Planning Approach for Achieving Sustainable Urban Development, Public Space for a Liveable City and Dynamics of Urban Planning Challenges.

One of the workshop highlights was the peer-to peer review where participants had a fruitful discussion to analyse and identify key challenges and strategies and come up with a set of recommendations to develop an urban regeneration project, Sungai Besi Town. This project aims at upgrading the quality of township in this area to increase tourism and business activity at the area of Sungai Besi and is currently at the planning phase. They went to visit the project prior to the discussion.

This year’s KLRTC workshop that focused on a more practical level is expected to equip participants with ready-to-use tools to improve their own projects and thus bring tangible improvements for their cities at their disposal.