Highlights

Context and Rationale

The second workshop of the 2018 cycle on urban and territorial development, organized by Avitem, CMI, AFD and GIZ took place in Greater Tunis in September 2018, after a first workshop held in Tangier and Tetouan in May 2018. The rationale for choosing Greater Tunis was:

• A context of large-scale institutional change underlined by the decentralization process implementation: the adoption of the Local Government Code in April 2018 and municipal elections held in May 2018 (and in the middle run, regional elections to be held) raise many issues regarding the future distribution of competences, the transfer of financial and human resources and more generally the optimization of public policies. In the absence of a metropolitan government, the need for an interinstitutional, project-oriented cooperation at the metropolitan scale is of particular importance.
   
• A capital metropolis still in search of a project: Tunis, Tunisia’s capital city, hosts some 2.6 million inhabitants – one fourth of the population – and concentrates a large share of the country’s wealth and growth. The urban area is expanding on a large territory, over 4 governorates and 38 municipalities, as a consequence of major public and private projects as well as an informal urban sprawl. The metropolitan project is nevertheless emerging, more as a sum of large-scale projects than as a new way of considering planning and development issues.
   
• High-level actors always ready to cooperate: the urban sector in Tunisia is of a high intellectual quality. There is a culture of cooperation between researchers, academics, planning agencies, developers, associations, etc. This highly internationalized ecosystem is eager to play alongside elected officials a decisive role in the development of the capital region.

Objectives

Two main objectives are given to the metropolitan workshops (2018 cycle):

• Better understand metropolitan processes through observation on the ground and meeting with local actors, by emphasizing three key aspects: (i) connectivity (how to favor flows to ensure international and local integration), (ii) resilience to global and local challenges (climate change, social and territorial cohesion, creation of values and jobs in a context of increased competitiveness, capacity to deal with migratory flows, etc.) and (iii) metropolitan government & governance to promote urban projects.
   
• Identify and share benchmarks and lessons learned on how to favor the coordination of projects and policies at the metropolitan scale and, ultimately, make the metropolis.

The Center for Mediterranean Integration organized the morning session of Day 3 (September 26) on territorial development issues in metropolitan contexts. This morning session was shared between:

• A visit of two urban projects in the municipality of La Soukra (a suburb of Tunis): (i) an ecodistrict (“Green Village”); (ii) a precarious neighborhood that benefited from infrastructure upgrading works (drainage, wastewater, road pavement, street lighting) funded by the PDUGL (Urban Development and Local Governance Project) supported by the World Bank.
   
• A roundtable organized at the Municipality of La Soukra on the theme “La Soukra in the Metropolitan Area of Greater Tunis: Assets or Constraints?”. This roundtable was organized with the support of the FNVT (National Federation of Tunisian Cities) and Cities Alliance's country program in Tunisia.
   

Resources

Agenda

Press Review

Article summarizing the conclusions of the workshop published in the journal Archibat