Participative Planning in Africa. Firts steps in the Director Plano of Huambo

Huambo has central capacities able to compete and complement other major towns in Africa such as Johannesburg and Nairobi. Nevertheless, Huambo, the second city of Angola, was at war from 1975 till 2002 and continued to be relatively isolated from 2002 till 2006, because it took some time to rebuilt former roads. Furthermore the destruction of the export based activities during the war reduced the capacity of the city to regain the development path experienced in the sixties and early seventies. Under these circumstances the design of a Director Plan is necessarily a strategic plan of a city that has lost its export base and has obvious difficulties in getting its role in Africa. The Provincial Government asked for a Plan which design should be participated. The first question is to know who the stakeholders are and what are their expectations? The second issue is to design a participative and consistent strategy. In this paper we report the first phase of the Plan which includes not only the characterization and diagnosis of the region but also the design of a participatory strategy. We used Q Methods to interact with the stakeholders and a Spatial Interaction Model with Land Use to create consistent scenarios that arise from the political and entrepreneurial options related to the location of a new modern airport, the new export base of the town, the solution in terms of urban densities, the structure of the transport network and the design of land use planning measures.