BEYOND THE PLAN: BUILDING IN-HOUSE CAPACITY TO PLAN, DESIGN AND IMPLEMENT URBAN AND TERRITORIAL TRANSFORMATIONS, CASE OF ‘CASTRIES VISION 2030’

The paper will depart from a premise that ‘in-house’ drafting of urban policy and planning is to be prefered over the conventional wholesale outsourcing to private consultancy, especially for small-island states like Saint Lucia in the Southern Caribbean. It relates to anecdotal evidence that 80% of the knowledge of a city (or any other territory for the matter) is born by its residing communities, with external advisers or consultants only needed to unlock, broaden, deepen and process that community-based knowledge into a visionary and actionable plan. This general rule and approach was tested and once again proven right in Castries, Saint Lucia’s capital city, thanks to all the stakeholders and individuals that voluntarily contributed to a new people-centred Vision for Castries, within a compressed timeframe of only 4 months. In this article the authors – both heavily involved in the drafting of the Castries Vision 2030 in respective roles as external adviser and domestic chair of the planning team – testify about their practitioners experience with in-house and rapid planning to address pressing challenges related to depopulation of the core-city, informal housing, urban crime, environmental degradation, traffic congestion and last but not least imminent threats triggered by climate change. While the content and output of the plan is worth sharing, the emphasis in this contribution will be on the planning process and concerns related to insufficient and ineffective planning capacities to ensure a stepwise implementation of the Shared Vision to prepare Castries for its Golden Jubilee as the capital of independent Saint Lucia in 2029.