BMZ, GIZ, TSPA supporting Georgia's Urban Development
TSPA is proud to support the implementation of the GIZ project Promoting sustainable cities in Georgia, commissioned by the German Federal Ministry for Economic Cooperation and Development (BMZ). The project aims to enable Georgian cities to develop participatory, climate-sensitive, and investment-ready urban projects in close cooperation with the national government. The project is politically backed by the Georgian Ministry of Regional Development and Infrastructure (MRDI) and runs from 2023 to 2027.
Urban development in Georgia faces multiple challenges—from outdated infrastructure to limited local planning capacities. To address these issues, the above partners adopted the Urban Lab Approach, a methodology that combines integrated infrastructure planning, real-life experimentation, and local capacity-building. The focus lies on sustainable infrastructure in the areas of mobility, energy efficiency, waste management, and inclusive public space design.
Through this approach, selected cities—for now Zugdidi and Batumi, but the team is working to include a third city—receive targeted support to develop integrated Neighbourhood Concepts in collaboration with communities and civil society. The concepts are designed to enhance urban resilience and quality of life while laying the groundwork for future investment.
TSPA in turn supports GIZ implementing the project, and has been focusing on strengthening planning practices and implementation capacities in Georgia’s urban landscape since 2022. A core part of this effort is the support of local planning firms—helping to build lasting expertise within the country and ensuring that Georgian professionals are equipped to lead sustainable urban development in the long term.
Mind the Gap: Planning without Planners
Urban planning in Georgia is at a critical juncture. The legacy of Soviet-era technical knowledge is about to be forgotten, while a new generation recognises how the wild decades following 1991 caused deep and often irreversible damage to towns, cities, and landscapes. The urgency of sustainable development is becoming harder to ignore. Though the country has seen rapid growth and unrestrained urban expansion, it is increasingly clear—to both policymakers and civil society—that this path is no longer viable.
“Attempting to undo Georgia's recent sprawl is like trying to unboil an egg.
Yet Georgia lacks the institutional backbone to plan its urban future. There is no formal urban planning education. Architecture programs at public and private schools, for example the University of Georgia and Ilia State University, train skilled designers, but few graduates go on to develop the integrative, policy-oriented approach that urban planning requires. As a result, planning often ends up fragmented—further adding to the perception of planning as a technical add-on or a bureaucratic hurdle, rather than a strategic and participatory process.
The country’s polarised political climate continues to undermine the development of long-term planning structures. Trust in public institutions is at a low point, coordination between agencies is weak, and recruitment and project selection are too often influenced by personal connections rather than competence or public interest. As a result, city-shaping projects are delayed, remain unrealised, or are driven by short-term interests rather than long-term public value.
Yet despite these structural obstacles, GIZ could identify and select a number of emerging offices that are working to shift the narrative:
Geographic and Urbitectura with Colliers and STS; and BAU Design with BISC Partners.
Neighbourhood Plans for Batumi and Zugdidi
Here some insights into two of the workshops Alessandra and Thomas led as part of their support of the project. And a shoutout to Sophia Todua, Salome Gugushvili, Phillip Reviere, and Anka Derichs for their coordination and support!
Assessment, Goals, Opportunities: A Workshop on Defining Project Objectives for Zugdidi.
One of the modules was on Best Practices and Thematic Goals: This opening session introduced inspiring examples of integrated neighbourhood development from around the world, all aligned with the project’s Participatory, Climate-oriented, and Integrated (PCI) approach. The aim: to create a shared understanding of how global best practices can inform local strategies.
Participants explored how tactical urbanism and multi-scalar planning connect small interventions with bigger urban goals, among them the Superblocks initiative in Barcelona (and where it went right, and wrong), the Climate Proof Rotterdam project, or the time-tested Vauban Quarter in Freiburg, and what one can still learn from the process used there. By the end, everyone had a clearer sense of how these examples can guide the Zugdid concept.
Another example was the sketching session to develop a "weather map" of opportunities and threats, or a Spatial SWOT Analysis: Participant groups mapped out barriers and forces related to a specific project goal—such as Green, Inclusive, or Accessible. This exercise helped visualise how mobility, green infrastructure, public services, and other sectoral layers interact spatially, revealing both synergies and tensions. From there, the drawings were synthesized a single collective map—a visual foundation for defining priority areas for integrated action, to start designing intervention concepts in the next phase.
Rapid Participative Planning: A Workshop on Stakeholder Engagement Methods in Batumi.
GIZ and TSPA met with civil society representatives and the planning team in Batumi, to discuss the site and co-develop the design further, using a series of interactive exercises designed to promote co-creation, reflection, and validation. At the same time, we provided the participants with a set of tools to perform such workshops in the future.
During "Tour the Map", citizens annotated the maps with local knowledge, concerns, blind spots, and opportunities. This also served to validate the work the planning team had done.
Next up visioning: "Future Headlines". By drafting a news article set ten years in the future, participants could express aspirations to define a their vision of the area in an imaginative and playful way.
But we also added technical formal knowledge to the mix. For example, during the module on "Theory of Change and Portfolio of Solutions", we discussed with the designers, how they can derive planning measures from long term policy objectives, and use these objectives in tour to validate their design ideas.
