Urban Agriculture As Tool For City Planning Nablus City As A case Study
حسام مصطفى كامل الهدهد, عزام طبيلة, علي عبد الحميد
كلية الدراسات العليا-جامعة النجاح الوطنية · فلسطين
Urbanization is one of the major issues facing mankind today and is in its extent unique in world history. Neither international government bodies nor national or local governments are well prepared to deal appropriately with this development but none of them can afford to ignore this phenomenon. It is expected that by 2020, 40-45% of the poor in the Palestinian territories will be concentrated in towns and cities such as Nablus. The population projections showed that more 424,400 inhabitants will be served by the Metropolitan Nablus municipality in the year 2025. The rapid increase of population almost accompanying with the increase demand on food, space , water, job opportunities and renewable resources. The huge estimated quantities of consumed food by Nablus dwellers estimated in year 2000 at 38,584 tons will defiantly increase making the situation more complicated for the city planner to secure the city from the food consumption point of view, construction of suitable roads, storage facilities, lands for cultivation, and preserving enough water for irrigation. However, in the light of water scarcity which jumped from – 1,322 m³ per year in 2005 into -30,697 m³ per day in year 2025, and the decrease of the per capita available land from 150 m² in year 1989 to 78 m² in year 2000 in the light of high percentage of unemployed inhabitants, will complicate the problems of city planning. XIII This research which aimed at introducing urban agriculture as a tool for city planning have had investigated the impact and methods of such and as appropriate mitigation measure against major city problems in the city planning have a huge important conclusions leading to multiple scenarios to mitigate the problems of immigration of rural people to the city center and against the environmental hazards associated with urbanization such as the increase of solid wastes amounts, untreated waste water and many others. It is important to involve the multiple stakeholders in urban development utilizing urban agriculture as a tool for city planning due to its significant capabilities in preserving the environment, reforming the land use, mitigate random immigration, offering job opportunities. Representatives including municipal departments, NGO's, local leaders, village councils, private sector, academic or research and interested institutions must be involved in the planning processes is essential in order to address the needs and priorities of the different stakeholders involved, as well as the specific socio-economic and political-institutional context in each locality in order to allow better quality decision finding and making, improving likelihood of implementation and give the process a higher credibility for implementation. The local, provincial and national governments play a key role, ensuring the availability and secure tenure of land and water, access to public services, approval of regulations and standards, at the different levels of government are already engaged in many areas of service provision and regulation, such as urban planning, water treatment, waste collection, management of green spaces, which have direct interactions with urban agriculture. XIV Finally, the methodological approach adopted during the preparation of this vital research was including the data gathering and analysis using SWOT analysis techniques and many other calculations using the basic computer software packages. The basic data was collected from different and wide sources of information including newspapers, reports, books, magazines, articles and many others