Gangwon 1 October 2015- UN-Habitat and the International Urban Training Centre (IUTC) early last month held a training session focused on the use of land as an asset for cities to better organize urban development and create forms of self-financing urban infrastructure development. Learning activities provided participants with practical knowledge about the planning, design, implementation and management of land readjustment projects.

Some 22 participants from Bangladesh, Brazil, Bhutan, Indonesia, India, Mongolia, Nepal, Pakistan, Sri Lanka and Vietnam attended lectures, participated in field trips and actively engaged in exercises to develop skills on the use of land for guiding the development of their cities in a sustainable and efficient way.

The course began by examining the genesis and rationale of land development taking the long-standing Korean practice and know-how of the mechanism as the entry point for learning. Different land-based mechanisms were presented as tools to better distribute the social and economic benefits of public land-based policies, drawing on international examples.

Participants were exposed to an array of policy instruments and case studies developed to better capture the various dimensions of land development such as land value increment, property tax, value capture, transfer of development rights (TDR), etc. and took part in a role-playing exercise based on UN-Habitat’s practice.

The course finalized with Action Plans, whereby 64% of the participants expressed that this tool would be useful in their cities, while 9% are already implementing Land Readjustment projects and feel better prepared to implement them. This course series are jointly organized between UN-Habitat and IUTC. The next training course will focus on Integrated Water Management and will take place on November 3 – 10 November, 2015.

For more details on this and other courses, please send an email to UN-Habitat’s Capacity Development Unit at  UNI@unhabitat.org or visit IUTC website.