Visit to AUICK Associate Cities

One of AUICK's major activities consists of providing training in various aspects of integrated urban planning to administrators of AUICK Associate Cities (AACs). Two workshops are held yearly in Kobe, with at least one senior official from each of the nine cities in the partnership attending. Over 10-12 days, the senior officials learn of Kobe's experience in urban planning, especially in areas of population, reproductive health, primary health care and other aspects of human welfare. In addition to providing practical training in urban issues the workshops are a place where senior officials from the nine associate cities can meet one another, exchange ideas and learn from one another as well as from the Kobe City staff. This achieves one of the original requests made by the administrator participants in the 1987 Kobe Conference on Population and Development in Medium-sized Cities, which was the conference that led to the formation of AUICK in early 1989.

The new AACs strategy adopted in 2004 also aims to build up what can be called a critical mass of Kobe trained administrators in each of the nine cities. This group can then become an innovative cell to further effective urban planning in the city itself; and it can also help the city to be a node of innovation among the other cities of each of the nine countries.

One of the critical issues in any training program is to discover what impact this training actually has on the participants. AUICK administrators have made periodic monitoring visits to select cities to try to assess the impact of the training.

Another innovation in AUICK workshop strategy is to have the participants develop an action plan for their cities during the workshop, which they would attempt to implement when they returned to their cities. This would provide some direct evidence of the workshop's impact.

1. Visit to Weihai, China
2. Visit to Indonesia