The global scourge of the coronavirus pandemic has brought to fore the inadequacies in cities and countries, crystalizing the need for proper city planning and building, which promotes the well-being of people across countries of the world with particular focus on Nigeria’s peculiar situation.
Bearing in mind the role city planning plays in promoting the smooth functioning of both the living and non-living elements within any society, the Housing Development Advocacy Network (HDAN), recently brought together experts to give informed opinions on the theme “Sustainable And Pandemic Resilient Urban Planning”.
While fielding questions from HDAN Director and moderator of the webinar series, Barr. Festus Adebayo, TPL. Toyin Ayinde, Fmr. Hon. Commissioner for Physical Planning, Lagos State commented on the way forward for Nigeria in city planning post pandemic and other salient issues, speaking as a guest panellist.
Here are the excerpts.
• Comment on the relationship between planning and human settlement
“When we are discussing the issue of human settlement, and planning cities post-pandemic, we are talking about livability and sustainability part of the definition of Urban planning requires that a human settlement be lived with convenience and convenient means livability – living without stress. Also, whatever we are planning for today, should be able to take care of generations unborn and that’s where the sustainability comes in. Whatever resource we have is not to be consumed by us alone, but our great-grandchildren will also come and consume. So these are very important in setting the pace for planning itself.
“In human settlement, when talk about planning, we should know that the dominant subject of planning is man – the human being and the environment upon which he depends. I would like to say that anywhere in the world where value has not been attached to the life of a human being, there is really not going to be proper planning, implementation, growth and development. So in everything we do we must have that driving force that – this man must not die – and therefore we must make provision for him and that is what planning does.
“Planning and having sustainable living environment is not just about the town planner. The President of a nation should not be making a policy statement without consulting the town planner. So if a President says he’s going to build 10,000 houses in every state of the Nation, where would that be? A town planner has to know all of this because things have to be put in the right places. A Governor shouldn’t be making a statement that he would build the road from here to Badagry without having the advice of a town planner. So when you fail to plan you plan to fail. A lot of a settlement especially in this part of the world, have run into problems during the pandemic because of the fact that our settlement have not been well planned”.
• How does the nature of human settlement affect both the living and non-living elements within a society?
“Human settlement, cities, towns, villages and whatever you call them, are founded on Land and land is a finite resource, it is not infinite. Because of this you cannot deal with it as if it is reproducing itself. And because it doesn’t reproduce itself, then we must plan it so that it’s not just us that are using it, but also the coming generations.
“One other thing we must also note is that human settlements are like living organisms. The operating systems like human beings and living organisms have systems. Man has a circulatory system just as every city or town has a circulatory system – that is the road network. A human being has a respiratory system, how he breathes. The environment must have a respiratory system and that is why we make provisions for Open Spaces for those in the environment to be able to breathe. And you will find out that when the environment demanded breathing through the pandemic and they needed to set up isolation centers, some of the stadia were made available and so the environment was able to breathe because of the limited ones that we have. It also has a skeletal system – that is the infrastructure and once the infrastructure available are not sufficient, a body would collapse, if there is no skeleton in such a body. This is why cities and settlements are collapsing. A city also requires a digestive – and those are the processes and operations taking place everywhere from one sector to the other. It has a nervous system, there is a brain that connects all parts of the body – that’s what government does. And coming with various information from one sector to the other to make the city system work. It also has an excretory system, which is how we treat our waste. It has a reproductive system, where we produce – we have industry, agriculture and so on.
“Until we begin to view human settlement from that perspective that it is composed of a system within systems and that all of them interconnected and that we must bring the real stakeholders, the Professionals to participate in their organisation, we will not be able to make much progress”.
• What should Nigeria do post covid-19 in terms of proper city planning that marches the standard in other advanced countries?
“When people hear of planning, the only thing that comes to their mind is the building plan. And truthfully, building plan is a pedestrian aspect of urban planning. It is the most minute area that the planner is least concerned about because there are frameworks sitting in themselves as a system within which a building plan must sit. If those frameworks do not exist, the building plan itself is null and void.
“Talking about innovations, innovations are not entirely new things. Yes, when you introduce something new it is an innovation, but it is also possible that you introduce something old in a new way, it is also an innovation. Then it is also possible that something you have not been doing before, even if it has been done in decades in other places, when you bring it into your own environment, it is innovation. Then for what we are looking at to make a settlement sustainable after the pandemic is not just what is new here alone. It may have been used elsewhere and have been tested.
“A nation like Nigeria is supposed to have a National Physical Development Plan. How do the capital cities connect? Where are our airports? How are they relatively located? If there is an Airport in Lagos, does it make sense for another one to be in Abeokuta, because it is a state capital? So a National Physical Development Plan helps us to know how our nation is supposed to grow. We have in our own Wisdom created what we call geo-political zone. Those geo-political zones are regions that are supposed to have plans on their own. How will the state within each region connect they can interdependently benefit from one another. Every state that is supposed to have a regional plan”.
• How does migration affect city planning in Nigeria and what can be done to salvage the country’s situation?
“Migration happens because a lot of states do not have a regional plan. What does original plan do – it balances the development and Growth between all settlements within a state. This is how all of them link and relate. So for every development that has not been balanced, there is a tilt from the Rural areas to the Urban areas because the pressure of development is only in the Urban area.
“To answer to migration, our policy makers must embrace planning in a full-scale, in its whole hierarchy – no one is without the other. Then from original plan you cannot begin to talk about master plans of each city, because a master plan is a policy document subdivided into other zones, sectors, districts and neighborhoods. So until you have a neighborhood plan when you can identify your house, every building plan that is not connected to a neighborhood plan, and then connected to a district plan, connected to a sector plan, connected to a master plan, and a master plan that is not within the context of regional plan, all are null and void.
“We are not serious about planning and it is because we are ignorant. If we must really have an organised environment like all the nations of the world, we must embrace planning. If we don’t recognize planning we will all live in a mess and confusion”.
• What is the role of Town planners in planning a pandemic resilient city with Nigeria in focus?
“Planning tells us that this is the limit of our land and how we must develop and take advantage so that will have other lands for landscaping, Recreation and other things. So if we must get things right like in other climes where the planner is regarded as part of the building, the planner has to be regarded as part of the building team because he has a role to play and even while you are doing the microcosm of a building plan it still has to ensure that it is in consonance with the higher plan.
“As a town planner my responsibility is to the community. Once the person in the community is not feeling the impact of the planner, the planning has failed. But then planning should not fail if those in authority, policymakers recognize that planning is a tool that will help them to achieve all of their promises and that is why there must be a constant handshake between those in political appointments and urban planners, whether in the private or public sector.
“Everything you see in the world is created twice – first in the brain, and then in reality. So the town planner helps you create the city in the brain and also put it on paper and what we learnt in design school is that if you do not fail on paper you are likely to fail on land and then because the plan is dynamic, you are required to monitor and review it constantly”.
• What must government do differently to deliver on its recently promised target of 300, 000 housing target per year?
“The 300, 000 housing units target of government is a vision and I always like to encourage visions. I haven’t seen the blueprint of how it would go but I can tell you that whatever we want to achieve, we need to be determined in our hearts. Whether the government itself should go directly into construction, is what I doubt. I think the government should provide an enabling environment. Also for us to be able to achieve this 300, 000 housing, we should be willing and ready to industrialize housing production in Nigeria. We can decide to start manufacturing door locks. Let’s turn these things into an industry, such that we standardize it. This is what happens in other countries. Let’s use our local resources and go only for what we cannot produce.
“On our design and method of construction, we need to look at assembling buildings. Once you have prepared all of the prefabs in a batching plant, you can bring them and in a few weeks, you can put up a 6-floor building of 48 units, well ventilated. We need to look locally at our designers, let them do this for us and once we have a pilot and once we succeed, then we can ramp up”.
Tpl. Toyin Ayinde (FNITP, RTP) a Professional Town Planner registered with the Nigerian Institute of Town Planners. He has put over 30 years of dedicated service into the field of physical planning during which he served as Honourable commissioner (Ministry of Physical Planning & Urban Development) in Lagos State.
