Rabat — The challenge to be addressed today is to think collectively about means capable of building and strengthening the capacities of cities to be more resilient to natural disasters and repercussions of health crises, head of government Saad Dine El Otmani said on Wednesday in Rabat.

Speaking at an international conference organized by the Ministry of Town Planning, Housing and City Policy and the Interior Ministry, in partnership with the United Cities and Local Governments of Africa and the United Nations Human Settlements Program (UN-Habitat), on the occasion of the World Cities Day 2020, El Otmani underlined the need to pay attention to the growing challenges resulting from urbanization and environmental problems, as well as societal and psychological issues for citizens living in cities.

During this partially virtual conference, organized under the theme "Thinking and designing the city of tomorrow", he highlighted the need to work on building adaptive capacity to face the health crisis as well as adapting the land developing system and developing appropriate urban models in order to support cohesion and territorial equity, adopt a renewable housing model and implement a new city policy.

"The main challenge lies in the capacity to develop new models of urban design of the cities of tomorrow that are capable of adapting to cyclical changes, of generating wealth and of guaranteeing employment opportunities to mitigate the effects of the pandemic of Covid-19 on cities, by adopting an effective urban planning policy to tackle the social vulnerability and exclusion that can be caused by the expansion of cities," he said.

The head of government also reviewed Morocco's experience to adapt to the exceptional and unprecedented circumstance of the Covid-19 pandemic, noting that the Kingdom's urban system was at the heart of the challenges of the fight against the Coronavirus.