The government of The Bahamas, the Inter - American Development Bank (IDB), The College of The Bahamas (COB), and the Vienna University of Technology (UTV) convened the Urban Design Lab (UDL) in Nassau in order to deploy participative methodologies that allow for the integration of residents' visions in the formation of proposals for neighborhood revitalization.

The UDL is a dialogue-orientated planning and design methodology, which will define key activities for an urban Nassau in the framework of IDB's Emerging and Sustainable Cities Initiative (ESCI). The first step of this dialogue-oriented planning methodology was a series of planning workshops in the months of October and November 2015. This included an academic workshop week in November with students from the University of Technology in Vienna and The College of the Bahamas.

The UDL, which was developed by UTV and the ESCI team in the last two years, will conduct several workshops within the communities in central Nassau. In focus groups, specialists conducted interviews and research in specific areas of the city which the community considered interesting, for example East Bay Street and Grants Town. The result of the workshop week is a "preliminary urban strategy" of the proposed planning area.

Students from UTV visited Nassau in the last two weeks because of the Urban Design Lab and got to know Valentino "Scrooge" Brown, host of the Guardian Radio show "Inside the Inner City". He invited the students to join him on his radio show last Friday.

Click here to read more at The Nassau Guardian