Topic Document and Call for Applications: 'The Countryside, Like the City, Is Emancipatory', Région des Palmes, Haiti

The Région des Palmes groups four coastal communes southwest of Port-au-Prince, with about 450,000 inhabitants, where internal migration, informal urbanization, pressure on farmland and environmental degradation are concentrated. The paper recalls the January 12, 2010 earthquake, the national strategy of the CIAT and the intercommunal structure of the CMRP, whose four summary urban plans finalized in 2012 were not validated by the Ministry of Public Works and leave the region without an overall planning document. It proposes to reverse the view that the city is the only desirable horizon and asks how to strengthen solidarity between coastal plain and mountains, and between the Palmes and the capital, on water and watersheds, agriculture, housing and services in the mountains, National Road 2 and the risk that the region becomes a suburb of Port-au-Prince. It then sets the workshop format of 24 professionals in four teams of six, with two Haitian professionals in each, and invites applications from all disciplines, with 6 to 9 places reserved for Haitian or Caribbean professionals.