The CIAT Urban Planning Notebooks, No. 1

The Cahiers d'urbanisme are the CIAT technical secretariat's periodical on urban questions in Haiti, and this is the founding issue, dated November 2014 and carrying a national legal deposit reference and its own ISSN. It was produced with European Union backing under AGIL, the Programme d'Appui à la Gouvernance et à l'Investissement Local. The issue leads with an extended conversation with Dr Joan Clos, Executive Director of UN-Habitat, whose career the introduction sets out at length because it is the argument: a municipal councillor in Barcelona from 1983 who ran the rehabilitation of Ciutat Vella through combined financial and social investment and improved urban services, then twice mayor of Barcelona between 1997 and 2006, where he designed Barcelona 22@, converting some 250 hectares of industrial land and technology parks in one of the city's poorest districts with social housing, hotels and offices, and later Spain's Minister of Industry, Tourism and Trade.

Publishing that interview as the opening of a Haitian urban journal is a deliberate statement about municipal capability: that city government, given instruments and continuity, is what transforms a poor district. For a library otherwise short of Haitian urban-policy writing, the Cahiers are a rare domestically produced professional forum rather than a donor report.