Yesterday, we told you about the community planning experts from the American Planning Association who arrived in Belize to assist the Belize City Council in making improvements to the part of the City known as Yabra.

The head of the delegation is Justin Moore, a professional who works with the New York City Department of City Planning. Today, Mayor Darrell Bradley was on the ground with the team touring the area to come up with the best strategy to revitalize a part of the city which played an important part in its history, but has been forgotten in the present.

Daniel Ortiz reports:

Belize City Mayor Darrell Bradley, his technical staff at the City Council, and the consultants from the American Planning Association spent most of morning touring the City.

They then moved into the Yarborough Area to survey important aspects of the open space, such as the Football Field and Basketball Court, and the next door Wesley College Compound.

The Mayor then hosted his consulting guests on a boat tour of the Yarborough Waterfront, to get a distant perspective of the coast line that "Yabra" occupies.

The working plan right now is to transform this community to preserve its cultural and historical elements.

Darrell Bradley - Mayor, Belize City Council

"This area has several very renowned churches in Belize. You have the Anglican Cathedral, you have the Methodist church who is very active including with Wesley College. You have a lot of schools in this community, you have an organic level of businesses within the community, you have moppy who is very involved in community projects and so forth. So when you look at an area for intervention, you want to ensure that there is a vibrant community and artefacts that you want to maintain and preserve."

"Our main focus would be to increase the historic character of this area. I think that the area itself has a lot of natural treasures and artefacts in terms of telling stories of Belize City. But I think that it's often time overlooked; I grew up near to here and I look at Yabra Cemetery as being a place that I always regarded with some degree of reverence and I think that we can bring back the Yabra area, including the cemetery making it really like a focal point. When you walking through the cemetery, at the end of the cemetery you have a play yard, beyond from that you have the St. John's Cathedral. Right next to that you have the House of Culture and you have a cemetery right beyond the bridge by East and West Collet canal where we looked at as well with the Crips; when I went there I didn't even know that was a cemetery. I'm the mayor of the city, I've grown up in Belize City and I don't know the significant of particular areas and I think if we can make really the cemetery the focal point."

The purpose of a project like this for City Hall is to organize Belize City into zones so that they can stop haphazard growth that becomes problematic in the future.

Darrell Bradley - Mayor, Belize City Council

"The genesis of all of this is that we as a city have over the last 2 years been really focused a lot on urban planning. And when you look at Belize City and when I look at Belize City, I see that the Northern Highway would be a business district. So that would support businesses like banks and insurance companies and large stores because you have the roadway there, the networks and then you have parking. It's easily conducive to that kind of venture. You look at areas like these in terms of the down town and Fort George and Albert; which would be more the historic district, the tourism and entertainment areas for the city. And then what you would do is you would develop Belize City around economic cluster zones like a commercial district or like an historic and entertainment zone and then you are incorporating economic activity, small businesses and then concerns from residence and you can zone the city properly from that."

The administrators at City Hall are hoping that Yarborough residents will come out and actively participate in transformation of their living space.

Darrell Bradley - Mayor, Belize City Council

"The people from the American Planning Association are meeting with groups in the area, students, they are meeting with members of the various churches, meeting with business person, they are meeting with individual residence who have given us permission to go into their homes and to talk with them and as well they are looking at the physical site itself. A major part of the project has to be the level of community participating and community engagement. It's an area where we will want to have this intervention because we believe it is ideal for intervention but that has to be something that the community welcomes and will support for purposes of ensuring that there is sustainability to the project."