An alternative for poor cities in urban planning in the developing world

The efforts made to plan cities in emerging and developing countries are confronted with a number of issues, particularly in small and middle-sized cities, which can be classified as poor based on a number of criteria, including the socioeconomic level of the majority of the population, low levels of public investment, poor quality of local administration, and a high reliance on external donors. One of the main reasons, according to several authors, is that the philosophy and methods of urban planning applied to these specific contexts are directly reproduced from a Western tradition, which does not correspond to the local and national context in terms of needs, priorities, and financial resource organization. The cases of Koudougou, a medium-sized city with a population of 115, 000 in one of the poorest countries in the world, Burkina Faso, and Montes Claros, an industrial blooming city with a population of 360, 000 in Brazil, one of the most dynamic emerging countries in the world, will allow comparisons to be made in order to understand concretely which and how these deficiencies exist. And, more broadly, alternative models of urban planning better adapted to medium-sized cities, focusing on intermediation with their environment, with the goal of offering new urban planning instruments capable of addressing the main constraints of their urbanization in an efficient manner: growing population; territorial Extension and Fragmentation; Environmental Contamination and Heaving.