Building the City: First National Urban Forum, 10-17 March 2014

Haiti held its first National Urban Forum over eight days in March 2014, and this document is both its program and its rationale. The forum is presented as a staging post in a national and international calendar rather than a standalone event. Nationally, it was the occasion to take the regional issues raised at the Regional Urban Forums of the Grand Sud and the Grand Nord and consolidate them into a shared understanding of urban stakes at national level; the document states plainly that the recommendations coming out of the National Forum were to lay the base for drawing up a city policy for Haiti, which the country did not have. Internationally, it was positioned as an essential step in preparing for the World Urban Forum of April 2014, allowing the key themes Haiti would carry to the global level to emerge, in association with partner countries in the Caribbean. The 2013-2016 framing matters: it places the forum inside a defined urban agenda with a start and an end rather than treating urban policy as a permanent aspiration. As a record it documents the moment Haiti attempted to constitute a national urban policy community, and what that community identified as its own agenda.