Dix­ie-Ann Dick­son

Port-of-Spain is seg­re­gat­ed: high-in­come earn­ers live in the west and low-in­come earn­ers live east of the cap­i­tal. And there is very lit­tle in­cen­tive for eco­nom­ic de­vel­op­ment, with most stores cater­ing for low-in­come earn­ers. Those are the views of Dr Asad Mo­hammed, chair­man of the Na­tion­al Plan­ning Task Force, who said the main rea­son for this seg­re­ga­tion is out­dat­ed plan­ning pol­i­cy and reg­u­la­tions. "One of the many things that must hap­pen is a re­view and re­think of our plan­ning pol­i­cy," said Mo­hammed, dur­ing a in­ter­view last Fri­day at the Uni­ver­si­ty of the West In­dies, St Au­gus­tine. He said ear­li­er plans for the de­vel­op­ment of Port-of-Spain in­clud­ed stop­ping growth in ur­ban ar­eas and push­ing the de­vel­op­ment of sec­ondary cities out­side of the cap­i­tal. Mo­hammed said there's now a glob­al push to re­duce the spread of ur­ban ar­eas for en­er­gy ef­fi­cien­cy, ease of traf­fic con­ges­tion and re­duc­tion of green­house gas emis­sions.

"The same places we em­u­late, like North Amer­i­ca, are try­ing to main­tain their ex­ist­ing site and al­low in­ten­si­fi­ca­tion to take place." He said the task force, in col­lab­o­ra­tion with T&T So­ci­ety of Plan­ners, is now re­vis­ing the Plan­ning and De­vel­op­ment Bill in keep­ing with a new na­tion­al spa­tial de­vel­op­ment strat­e­gy. Mo­hammed said phase one of that strat­e­gy in­cludes a sit­u­a­tion analy­sis-col­lect­ing all ex­ist­ing poli­cies from var­i­ous min­istries: hous­ing, trans­port, agri­cul­ture."Var­i­ous gov­ern­ment agen­cies have pro­pos­als in their ob­jec­tives that are con­tra­dic­to­ry to oth­er agen­cies and the na­tion­al spa­tial strat­e­gy would help in­te­grate and co-or­di­nate all of those." An­oth­er key plan is to har­monise all 14 mu­nic­i­pal plans, which were orig­i­nal­ly con­ceived in iso­la­tion. "We need to de­ter­mine how com­pat­i­ble they are and iden­ti­fy in­con­sis­ten­cies in poli­cies or ap­proach­es," Mo­hammed said.

Mak­ing Port-of-Spain live­able

The cap­i­tal must have a bal­ance of res­i­dence and com­merce; with bet­ter qual­i­ty and quan­ti­ty of res­i­dences, busi­ness­es should ex­pand their mar­kets, his­tor­i­cal build­ings should be pre­served and park­ing should be tak­en out of the city, Mo­hammed said.

"In essence, make it an in­clu­sive city." The in­clu­sion of ur­ban de­signs and aes­thet­ics in ur­ban reg­u­la­tion sys­tems would al­so help. "We are go­ing to have more and more ur­ban cri­te­ria in­to the build­ing reg­u­la­tions of T&T. This would serve as a guide­line as to how peo­ple should build, ma­te­ri­als used, con­sid­er­a­tion of green spaces and prop­er main­te­nance of build­ings." New reg­u­la­tions should al­so in­clude how peo­ple treat with des­ig­nat­ed his­tor­i­cal or im­por­tant land­mark build­ings and sites, he said. The city al­so lacks ad­her­ence to oc­cu­pa­tion­al health and safe­ty rules and build­ings are not de­signed for the dis­abled to ac­cess. "We do not en­force ac­ces­si­bil­i­ty of build­ings and con­struct prop­er side­walks for the blind or the phys­i­cal­ly chal­lenged." He said T&T was al­so be­hind on en­er­gy ef­fi­cien­cy of build­ings. "With cli­mate change and high-en­er­gy costs, peo­ple are still build­ing struc­tures that cost too much to op­er­ate and main­tain. So we have to ed­u­cate both the pub­lic and the pri­vate sec­tors on this. "If we build and man­age our city and make it live­able for our peo­ple right now, it would be at­trac­tive to oth­er peo­ple."