Plan-OK-Please - Incubating Ideas for Regional Land Use Planning in India

Spatial planning in India is mostly limited to urban agglomerations. With a strong urban growth, a new type of urbanism arises, that seems to be neither rural nor urban. This so called ‘peri-urban’ growth encompasses a large amount of valuable land, and if not regulated, causes high costs for the construction of public (technical) infrastructure and leads to conflicts with other land uses, such as agriculture or with environmentally protected areas. Consistent and systematic spatial planning at the regional level can be an important contribution to plan the rural-urban linkage. Under the ‘Land Use Planning and Management’ (LUPM) project, GIZ collaborated with state governments of Tamil Nadu and Odisha to strengthen the culture of a democratic and integrative spatial planning in India and test several regional planning approaches. To share the learnings during the project, ‘Plan-OK-Please’ conference was organised.