- How to Approach the Upgrade of the Urban Scheme of Yamoussoukro Towards Sustainability?: A Focus on Commercial Planning    896 kb by    Sangare, Ahmed | sangsor@gmail.com    Short Outline This paper is a brief presentation of some planning guidelines that aim to harness the full potential of retail activities for the revitalization of the city of Yamoussoukro. These guidelines endeavour to make suggestions that might achieve the three pillars of sustainability. Abstract In 1983, to fight against the macrocephaly of Abidjan, the main city of Cote d’Ivoire, the Ivorian authorities decided to relocate the main ruling institutions from this city to Yamoussoukro, a small town created from scratch in the centre of the country. Yet despite all the large scale architectural projects built in Yamoussoukro thanks to what has been called “the Ivorian economic miracle” in the 1970s, this almost entirely planned town lacks a real urban vibe partly because of its low population. In fact, the city has not been able to attract enough people for its social and economic liveliness. This paper is an excerpt from a more comprehensive urban and architectural study that proposes a large scale modern commercial hub for the revitalization of Yamoussoukro. The proposed mall is based on the argument that productive projects that are economically sustainable are a prerequisite to the actual relocation of the capital city to Yamoussoukro, due to a radical change in the economic context in the country. We will not discuss in depth the viability of the very ambitious architectural project. We will rather focus on the strategic planning guidelines proposed for the retail sector, upstream from the architectural work itself, for a sustainable urban scheme that tries to improve the animation and attractiveness of the city. This report will present some proposals which try to illustrate the following planning and design tracks derived from the diagnostic of the urban context of Yamoussoukro: - A stronger focus on the retail sector in planning documents: the ultimate objective being to gradually elaborate specific planning documents for this sector. - The integration of some basic sustainability rules in the planning and the design of retail facilities; - The improvement of the urban vibe in the city via retail spaces. Keywords Mall, Retail, Sustainability, Social inclusion, Cultural Inclusion, Urban Vibe Case Study presented on the ISOCARP Congress 2012: Fast Forward: Planning in a (hyper) dynamic urban context   Click to open the full paper as pdf document   Click to send an email to the author(s) of this paper