In her research, Marie Redon seeks to understand how the European Union’s urbanization projects in Haiti have failed. She explores how Haiti has been the center of the “sustainable city” project since prior to the 2010 Earthquake. She follows this until three years after the Earthquake, in 2013. Redon begins to focus on how Haiti has attempted to urbanize in a sustainable fashion and how the European Union has led it to continuously fail. The question lies, what does sustainability mean to Haitians, both in longevity and in a “greener” future? She claims that international humanitarian effort is strengthening “urban fragmentation” 1. She uses the events of Port-au-Prince as a case study to draw conclusions on aid and development in general. Redon combines interviews, basic statistics, and joins the conversations of peer research to conclude the sustainable cities are unlikely to emerge due to the disunity of land management. She uses a brief bit about Haitian history to explain how the country has depended on other model countries to organize themselves but fail to merge their culture within the system. Redon adds that reconstruction projects prompted by NGOs and various outside organizations and governments promote the loop of unsustainable development through their lack of knowledge and their intrusion on communities.

1.

Redon, Marie. “The model’s limitations what ‘urban sustainability’ for Port-au-Prince? European urban projects put to the test by the Haitian city,” European Spatial Research and Policy 20, no. 2 (January 2014), 43.

Redon, Marie. “The model’s limitations what ‘urban sustainability’ for Port-au-Prince? European urban projects put to the test by the Haitian city,” European Spatial Research and Policy 20, no. 2 (January 2014), 41-56.