Location Saint Michel de l’Attalaye and Saint Raphaël, Haiti
Client UTE-MEF (financed by the World Bank)
The PAEEV (Plan d’Aménagement, Extension et Embellissement de la Ville) is the legal planning instrument used in Haiti, under the law of 29 May 1963 establishing rules on the planning and urbanism of towns and municipalities, completed by a compendium of decrees and laws compiled by CIAT in 2013.
The municipalities of Saint Michel de l’Attalaye and Saint Raphaël lie in Haiti’s central plateau, in the Artibonite region. These are agricultural areas of particular productive interest: Saint Raphaël is known as the Granary of the North, and Saint Michel de l’Attalaye for its sugarcane distilleries producing Clairin, a raw rum spirit.
The population of the two municipalities is approximately 150,500 and 54,000 respectively, with around 35% living in urban areas.
Within the classic methodology for drafting an urban plan, the PAEEV is structured in Diagnosis, Future Vision and Normative Document phases, including an investment plan-programme. The first two phases were carried out participatively, identifying the population’s priorities and facilitating understanding of the current situation and of different development scenarios, with a strong focus on the need to change the current trend.
The diagnosis combined technical work — data collection, observation and site visits, analysis of how the towns function, mapping and delimitation, including identifying a landfill site — with a participatory process in which key stakeholders were identified and a community workshop was held to complete and validate the collected data and, above all, to identify and prioritize needs sector by sector, applying criteria of spatial and social justice and a gender and equality perspective.
To debate these scenarios with the community and shape them collectively, the team chose not to use technical plans but figurative, easily understood graphics — illustrating, for example, the loss of vegetation cover and trees, the loss of farmland, the loss of heritage, increasing pollution, the use of green energy, and facilities. Each scenario was linked to a list of actions drawn from the participatory diagnosis, with both scenarios strongly focused on the agricultural potential of the two municipalities — including a shared proposal to create an AGROPOL.
The resulting zoning proposal is based on the zoning codes of the 1963 law and includes a basic graphic regulation, easy for non-specialist staff to interpret. The investment plan-programme was developed on two levels: a five-year programme with five priority projects selected and voted on by the community, and a plan covering the full lifetime of the master plan, including tables and a timeline to track implementation.
This remains the weak point of urban planning in Haiti: it depends on substantial investment that no single actor — multilateral banks, bilateral cooperation, NGOs, or national and municipal government — commits to delivering in full, so even short-term forecasts remain uncertain given the general difficulties of implementing cooperation and development projects in these contexts.