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Timosoara Mayor Gheorghe Ciuhandu's city plan is 'the bible'.

In Tirana: painting the town red, blue, orange.

Creating a stable, predictable investment environment requires adoption and enforcement of carefully-thought-out urban planning to guide development, a roundtable of seven mayors agreed today in a roundtable discussion during the EBRD Annual Meeting.

“After 42 years of communism and dictatorship, Romania and its cities had a lot of problems to solve to prepare for the market economy,” said Timosoara Mayor Gheorghe Ciuhandu. “One of the first issues was urban planning. Now our urban plan is our bible” which was one reason, he said, the city has managed to attract four times the national average of inward investment from international companies.

Urban planning is an essential element in providing a stable investment environment, said Eduard Shalsi from the municipality of Tirana, Albania. Tirana’s city plan means “everyone knows what’s going to be built where,” he said.

The current city government of Tirana is known for acting against illegal construction in Tirana that included thousands of kiosks in public squares, he said.

After years of dictatorship, “Albanians conceived of democracy as a chance to attack nature and occupy public spaces,” he said. Taking the problem in hand, the city government “knocked down buildings, widened streets, created parks, lit the streets and painted the buildings.” Street after street of dull gray concrete buildings have been painted in vivid colours and whimsical designs that have delighted some and shocked others.

The mayors commiserated with each other about their need for huge levels of investment to deliver the improvements to infrastructure – better roads, street lighting, water and sewerage management, public transport and cleaning up historic buildings – that would make them more attractive to investors and tourists.

“Bucharest doesn’t have wastewater treatment, the waste goes straight into the Danube, then to the Danube delta, then into the Black Sea,” said Vice-Mayor Raznan Murgeanu. “I hope within five years we can solve this problem. With the help of private parners, our water company provides much better levels of service than in the past. We hope that with the waste-water investments, the whole system will be at a european standard,” he added.

“I can recognize the same problems in Belgrade,” replied Nenad Bogdanovic, mayor of Belgrade, Serbia where the Annual Meeting was held. Mr Bogdanovic reflected that Romania’s planned entry into the European Union in 2007 means the country is both required to achieve EU standards and has better access to EU financing than does Serbia to reach them.

Vice-Mayor Murgeanu said Bucharest used to be called ‘le petit Paris’ but now it’s called ‘little Moscow’ because of all the concrete buildings erected during the communist era. However, on the plus side, he said good city management means Bucharest has been granted a BB-stable rating by Standard and Poors. “I hope in the summer we will be upgraded to BBB.”

The Mayor of Nis, Serbia, reminded the others at the table of “the unnecessary wars and bad politics conducted (in the 1990s) that resulted in Nis’ situation.” This includes an influx of 30,000 inhabitants and a population of 40,000 unemployed people. “Nis has the opportunity to become a truly European city but it needs a general town plan and we need assistance for that.

“Major roads and railways run through the core of the city and they must be moved out. We cannot develop without fixing the infrastructure.”

Most of the mayors said they consider public-private partnerships as the only way to meet their citizens’ and businesses’ infrastructure needs. Such partnerships can be structured in many different ways but involve the private sector building and/or maintaining public goods such as water systems.

“Money is not the issue, good projects are the issue,” said Slavko Kojic, Zagreb’s treausurer. “Good projects will always find funding.”

Gavin Anderson, the Bank’s Business Group Director for Infrastructure, reminded the mayors that “all investment, like politics, is local. That’s where things are felt. EBRD has invested in almost all the cities around the table and the experiences you are relating here from one city are very relevant to the others.”

Written by EBRD Senior Writer Kate Dunn.

23 May 2005