Land policy and the informal city in Nigeria
Nwaka, Geoffrey I.
The arguments in Nigeria over whether the urban or the rural areas should be given greater priority in national development appear somewhat misplaced and unhelpful because the urban and rural areas are mutually interdependent, with many complex links and interactions between them, and the constant movements of people, goods, money, ideas and information from one to the other. For this reason, the Habitat Agenda of the Istanbul City Summit advocates "an integrated approach to promote balanced and mutually supportive urban-rural development (through) strong local and national institutions that place emphasis on ruralurban linkages, and treat villages and towns as two sides of the human settlement continuum" The paper considers ways to overcome the traditional divide between urban and rural planning and development, and by so doing achieve a balanced and more sustainable pattern of development and poverty reduction. It focuses on the promotion of small and intermediate urban centres as an appropriate middle course which combines the advantages of urban as well as rural approaches to development, but without the disadvantages of large population concentrations in a few metropolitan areas, or of the wide dispersal of investments and scarce resources in scattered villages too small to support basic services. Medium and small towns are uniquely placed in the urban-rural interface to foster mutually beneficial linkages between them, and also to promote the more sustainable use of natural resources in the surrounding region. Recent research suggests that more than half of the urban population in Africa lives in urban centres of this size group, and that the massive increase in urban population expected in the next 20 years will occur in these small towns, hence the urgent need to take their growth, planning and links with the rural areas fully into account in the development effort.
Event: XXIII International FIG Congress : Shaping the change
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