Cameroon celebrates World Day for Urbanisation amid poor town planning

The joint celebration of the World Day for Urbanisation and Towns was a forum for urban planners and engineers to reflect on how to come up with inclusive towns that guarantee sustainable development. To achieve the goal of building modern towns, planning and restructuring of existing facilities is indispensable, experts noted. They blame the haphazard construction of houses in most urban and sub urban areas to the inexistence of planning.

The Minister of Housing and Urban Development insisted on the respect of Urban Development Plans that are designed to promote social cohesion in towns and ensure sustainable urban development. Minister Jean Claude Mbwentchou hopes by 2020, many towns in Cameroon will respect urban planning thereby reducing the risk of man-made disasters due to the emergence of slums, disorderly built houses that block drainage systems.

For their part,the urban planners and engineers observed that they will engineer the end to the disorder in the housing sector though the introduction of descent lodging that takes into account the economic, social and environmental aspects of inclusive development.