KINGSTON, Jamaica – To prevent urban sprawl, the National Environment and Planning Agency (NEPA) is continuing its push to encourage developers to consider building more vertical structures.

The term “urban sprawl” describes the spread of unplanned, low-density, auto-dependent development over large areas of land, resulting in significant distances between homes, businesses, and places of employment.

Addressing a Jamaica Information Service (JIS) ‘Think Tank’ on Wednesday, Senior Manager, Spatial Planning Division at NEPA, Dwight Williams, said that “the importance of urging developers to build taller buildings is to maximise the allowable building spaces available in the urban areas”.

He also shared that vertical development is being encouraged to prevent sprawling on agricultural lands and environmentally sensitive areas.

“We are crying out for more green spaces [and] we want to ensure that we have a lot of it, so rather than spreading development as we used to, we are now having a shift where we’re saying, let us do vertical development,” the senior manager said.

He added: “if we can build in a compact manner, we will have more spaces for our green areas.”

From an agency standpoint, Williams pointed out that as urban planners “our main task is to really allocate land uses to satisfy the various demands in urban and rural areas across Jamaica”.

“We want to ensure that our cities and communities are developed in a sustainable, resilient and inclusive manner, and one of the major tools that we use to undertake this important function is what we call our Development Orders,” he said.

A Development Order (DO) is a legal document that outlines, among other things, policy statements and guidelines that regulate and control the use of the land to ensure that it is not misused.

It is prepared by the Town and Country Planning Authority (TCPA) located within NEPA, in collaboration with major stakeholders, such as the municipal corporations.

Williams pointed out further that once a DO is confirmed, it is used by the TCPA and municipal corporations to guide development in the area to which it applies.

– JIS