Urban Regeneration and Sustainable Housing Development in Nigeria

Olufemi Adedamola Oyedele, ND Building Technology, BSc. Estate Management, MSc. Housing, MSc. International Project Management, MPhil. Construction Management, ANIVS, RSV. E-mail: femoyede@gmail.com.

Abstract

By 2030, about seventy per cent of the world population will be living in urban areas. This is premised on the Gregariousness of man, the impact of urban magnets, the impact of repulsive in the rural areas like lack of social activities, lack of/poor income, bad roads and lack of modern structures like bridges, farmers’ markets and hospitals and lack of government ‘presence’ which inhibits urban-rural movement and encourages urban-rural drift. The impact of globalization is also adding to the imbalance in urban-rural quotient in developing nations and is affecting housing quantities and qualities in urban areas. Urban regeneration can act as panacea to sustainable housing development by militating against urban decay. With a dwindling economy, Nigeria has a great challenge in general infrastructure provision and this is majorly felt in the rural areas. The urban areas have the challenges of inadequate housing infrastructures in the form of shelter, transportation means, waste management, industrial areas, education facilities, blue infrastructures (pools, artificial lakes, waterways and ponds), green infrastructures (recreation grounds, gardens and parks), services like sewages and waste management centres etc. The commute times between two communities in cities in Nigeria greatly exceed the commute times of similar distances in urban communities in developing countries. The solution to the myriads of challenges of Nigerian cities is in urban regeneration and sustainable housing development of our cities. Our cities must be self-sufficient, smart, resilient, green and users-friendly. This paper will explore the literature review methodology of research to highlight the importance and challenges of urban regeneration and sustainable housing development in Nigerian cities.

Key words: Cities, Housing, Urban Blight, Urban Regeneration, Sustainable Housing Development.

Introduction

Urban renewal, which is generally called urban regeneration in the United Kingdom and, sometimes, urban revitalization in some states in the United States of America, is a program of land redevelopment in areas of urban decay or moderate to high density urban land-use. The objective is to make urban communities environmentally, socially and economically livable. Renewal has had both successes and failures in different communities (Nelson, 1988). Urban regeneration can enhance the beauty of a community and where there is demolition without provision for alternative accommodation; can add to the woes of people. Urban regeneration is the attempt to reverse community decay by both improving the physical structure, and, more importantly and elusively, the economy of those areas that are decayed and/or causing clog in the

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wheel of cities’ growth and development. In all regeneration programmes, public money is used as an attempt to channel scarce investment into a community.

According to UNO (2014), “Today, 54 per cent of the world’s population lives in urban areas, a proportion that is expected to increase to 66 per cent by 2050. Projections show that urbanization combined with the overall growth of the world’s population could add another 2.5 billion people to urban populations by 2050, with close to 90 percent of the increase concentrated in Asia and Africa. This influx of people from rural to urban areas will surely bring housing challenges to the urban area and cause urban sprawl. According to Olokor (2012), The Minister of Federal Capital Territory, Senator Bala Mohammed, has blamed the housing and infrastructure deficits in the FCT on the influx of expatriates and people from other parts of the country. Mohammed stated that the daily influx of people to the FCT has been affecting government‘s efforts to increase the housing stock and infrastructure development.

This influx of people to the cities is premised on the Gregarious nature of man, the impact of urban magnets like income-making opportunities, electricity, modern buildings, tap-borne water, recreation areas, better telephone and internet networks, modern transportation facilities, modern shopping centres (facilitating access to modern technology, electronics and fashion) etc, which are available in the urban areas and the impact of repulsive like lack of social activities, lack of/poor income, bad roads and lack of modern structures like bridges, farmers’ markets and hospitals and lack of government ‘presence’ which restrains urban-rural movement and encourages urban-rural drift.

Without undue pressure, Africa has more than it can bite in the area of urban planning and housing sustainability. This is a challenge that the professionals in the built environment must face squarely and grab with the zeal of proving their worth in environmental design and management. An environment is the product of those living in it. Urban areas in developing countries are characterized by high density of people with the density predicted to increase in the coming decades. These challenges are not insurmountable with training and education on urban regeneration and sustainable housing practice.

Various researchers and writers have, in the past, related urban planning with sustainable development (economic, social and environmental development) (Park, Burgess, Roderick and McKenzie, 1925; Hoyt, 1939; Harris and Ullman, 1945; Onibokun and Faniran, 1995). The arrangements of different land use can influence behaviours. This is referred to as urban structure. Urban structure is the arrangement of land use in urban areas. Architects, urban planners, sociologists, psychologists, economists, and geographers have developed several models, explaining where different types of people and businesses tend to exist within the urban setting.

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The aim of this paper is to highlight the challenges of urban regeneration and to relate effective urban regeneration and sustainable housing to economic, environmental and social development of nations.

Literature Review on Urban Regeneration and Sustainable Housing Development

According to Lederer (2016), “The report by Nairobi-based UN-Habitat stated that in 15 years, cities will be producing as much as 80 percent of global Gross Domestic Product (GDP). This means that majority of the jobs will reside in cities. In 1995, there were 22 large cities with between 5 and 10 million inhabitants and 14 megacities with more than 10 million inhabitants around the world. By 2015, the numbers had doubled to 44 large cities and 29 megacities, mostly located in the developing world”. This trend will continue especially with the urban sprawl in developing nations.

In many Nigerian cities, the city centres are decaying without any programme of rehabilitation, while new urban peripheries develop without planning or the necessary infrastructure (Onibokun & Faniran, 1995). Due to lack of urban renewal schemes in Nigeria, new towns which are unplanned and devoid of services and infrastructures spanned up around cities. Over a period of 30 years (1952-1982), the population in most major towns has increased five-fold. Lagos, Kano, Port Harcourt, Maiduguri, Kaduna, Jos and Ilorin had over 1000 per cent increases over three decades. Ibadan rose from 625,000 in 1963 to 2.84 million in 1982; Enugu rose from 174,000 in 1963 to 850,000 in 1982; Lagos rose from less than 1 million in 1963 to over 4 million in 1982 (Onibokun, 1987).

These population increases account, in part, for the rapid physical expansion of these cities. For example, the physical extent of Enugu was 72.52 square kilometres in 1963. By 1975, it had more than doubled to 180 square kilometres and by 1985, had more than tripled to 204 square kilometres. This gives an average annual physical expansion rate of 5.98 square kilometres between 1963 and 1983 (Onibokun and Faniran, 1995). Today, Enugu has 460 people per square kilometre. Lagos has the highest population density in Nigeria which prompted the movement of the federal capital from Lagos to Abuja, Federal Capital Territory (FCT) in 1992.

Cities are places where a certain energized crowding of people takes place. This has nothing to do with absolute size or with absolute numbers: it has to do with settlement density. The vast majority of towns in the pre-industrial world were small: a population of 2,000 or less was nothing uncommon, and one of 10,000 would be noteworthy (Kostof, 2009). A city is a centre where there is a specialized differentiation of work. There are two types of cities: Historical and Man-made or ancient and modern. Ancient are unplanned and has been left as heritage sites, while modern cities are planned and structured based on either concentric zones theory examples of which are Chicago and London (Burgess, 1925) or sector theory examples of which are Philadelphia, Lagos and Port Harcourt (Hoyt, 1939) or combination of the two examples of which are Sheffield, England and Dublin, Ireland (Harris and Ullman, 1945).

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According to UNICEF (2016), the definition of ‘urban’ varies from country to country, and, with periodic reclassification, can also vary within one country over time, making direct comparisons difficult. An urban area can be defined by one or more of the following: administrative criteria or political boundaries (e.g., area within the jurisdiction of a municipality or town committee), a threshold population size (where the minimum for an urban settlement is typically in the region of 2,000 people, although this varies globally between 200 and 50,000), population density, economic function (e.g., where a significant majority of the population is not primarily engaged in agriculture, or where there is surplus employment) or the presence of urban characteristics (e.g., paved streets, electric lighting, sewerage).

Urban regeneration is been embarked upon as a solution to a great habitat challenge being faced by city dwellers around the world: the decay and deterioration of our cities and their planned and phased renaissance. It requires finance, time, professionals, harmony among stakeholders and maintenance. The challenge, however, is even greater than restoring and rebuilding the physical fabric of cities: it is to provide a new economic base to replace the one that has been lost, to restore hope to communities that have been shattered, to provide children and adults alike with a better chance in life and a new phase of life.

It is a massive task that requires 'out of the box' thinking, intellectual rigour and collaboration. Urban renewal success depends on three factors, according to Bartlett (2016) and these are:

the ability by urban planners and developers to understand and critically analyse complex urban issues,

the boldness by the public, private and civil sectors to address those issues in a creative, strategic and mutual manner, and

the confidence by the urban professionals to propose appropriate and realistic implementation plans to the public sector.

In the past, when we use the word “sustainable housing”, we meant houses that are designed to reduce the overall environmental impact during and after construction in such a way that we can meet the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs (Brundtland Report, 1987). In modern parlance, sustainable housing is not only about houses that shelters human beings and act as comforter against inclement weather, serves as resting place, a place for family cohesion and resting and strategizing for day-to-day activities of man. Sustainable housing encompasses the optimum land use (urban structure or community space planning) with the aim of achieving residential usage, transportation usage, and industrial usage.

Other inputs of sustainable housing include services usage (electricity, water, waste management, waste water channels, sewage treatment system, etc), green infrastructure usage (parks, recreation areas and gardens), blue infrastructure usage (waterways, natural or artificial

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rivers and lakes, ponds and swimming pools), brown-field usage, education facilities usage, health facilities, security facilities, governance facilities, shopping centres, tourism centres, sport centres, social event centres etc. Sustainable housing is the housing system that is economically, environmentally and socially feasible and viable. It must embrace housing culture; locally sourced-building materials to ensure housing affordability; modern construction methods, materials and technology; social and economic housing etc.

Nigeria housing system is in disarray. The housing market is unorganized (Agbola & Olatubara, 2003), underfunded (Ajanlekoko, 2001; Nubi, 2002) and unprofessional (Oyedele, 2012). Njoku and Okoro (2014) posited that “The problems of urban centres in Nigeria as reviewed are that most of them are disorganized, overcrowded, declined, dilapidated and blighted areas and with developed slums”. This development will continue in decades to come with the challenge being in how the developing nations can surmount mega-cities challenges. Already, there are housing problems in our urban areas like Lagos, Ibadan, Port Harcourt, Enugu and Abuja, in the form of scarcity of shelter, inadequate and bad roads causing delay in average commute times, lack of electricity, lack of pipe-borne water, lack of artisans and tradesmen and high rate of unemployment at 12.4% (NBS, 2016). These predicaments can only be solved by urban regeneration and sustainable housing.

Informal settlements or slums that are establishing throughout the world are menace to sustainable development. The world’s growing urban population means that millions of people now live in informal settlement – shanty towns, slums and favelas. These eyesore settlements are rife with diseases, crime and poor sanitation, yet residents chose to stay put because they offer an opportunity to make a living in a ‘thriving economic hub’. According to UN Habitat programme, informal settlements refer to residential areas where occupants have no legal claims, are unplanned and the housing does not comply with current planning and building regulations (Ubale, Martins & Wee, 2013).

Urban regeneration is about performance-based built environment. According to Reading (2016), some of the methods and actions to achieve urban regeneration are:

1. Economic Development of Urban Areas2. Physical Improvement of Urban Areas3. Environmental Actions4. Neighbourhood Strategy to improve security and5. Training and Education

Economic Development of Urban Areas

Economic development of urban areas deals with the social and economic issues of transportation projects; provides funding for transport measures that support area regeneration objectives; gives priority to the public transport needs of regeneration areas within local transport plans and public funding decisions; finances and funds brown-field development; charges taxes

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to all forms of private non-residential car parking provisions; restructures economy towards sectors that consumes fewer environmental resources in use, manufacturing or disposal; charges an environmental impact fees on new development to reflect its full environmental costs; charges tax on vacant land, which does not penalise genuine developers, but which deters owners holding onto land unnecessarily (speculative holding of land); defines what constitute property development as having foundation on the land for proper property tax; rates houses for environmental rating and running cost rating, so that house-buyers know what they are getting for their money; collects taxes on properties; tackles Low Demand Housing Areas (LDHAs) and provides adequate infrastructures; enforces the sale of abandoned and dilapidated sites or buildings after due notices have been given to the public; allows public bodies flexibility to pay disturbance payments over and above market value in reaching negotiated settlements for the acquisition of land; allocates an above-inflation funds for managing and maintaining the urban environment; establishes jointly funded management arrangements between local authorities and  local businesses for improving town centres and other commercial districts; uses fines from criminal damage and community reparation to repair and maintain the local environment, according to local people’s stated priorities (stakeholders’ participation in land governance); takes into account economic needs when designating employment sites (industrial, office and commercial land usage) in local development plans; creates revolving funds for land assembly, so that public investment in the initial costs of site purchase can be off-set by a share of subsequent gains achieved through regeneration and disposal (capital gains); introduces regional regeneration investment companies and funds to increase the amount of private finance flowing into the regeneration projects; facilitates pilot estate renewal projects and other area regeneration projects through the private finance initiative, introduces a package of tax measures, providing incentives for first-time developers, investors, small landlords, owner-occupiers and tenants to contribute to the regeneration of urban sites and buildings that would not otherwise be developed; ensures public subsidy for social housing developments; increases the cost effectiveness of public support for housing renewal by private owners by using a mix of grants, loans, equity stakes and tax relief to encourage home improvements; attracts institutional investment into the residential private rented market; attracts private investments in urban housing; improves public investments in urban housing; ensures partnership approach to development instead of corporatism; unlocks latent demand and expenditures from current users and visitors and attracts new visitors; fulfils the social and economic needs of local people; works with the local market; facilitates economic success at national, regional and local levels and develops regular regeneration projects.

Physical Improvement of Urban Areas

Urban regeneration manages and maintains the whole urban environment; maintains land and premises to an acceptable standard (including public utilities and agencies properties; designs for inclusive and safe public spaces in all forms from grand to intimate; plans public facilities; improves the quality of urban design; produces an integrated spatial masterplan for area regeneration schemes; ensures physical development gets approval; adopts an integrated approach to design-led regeneration of different types of urban neighbourhood; designs regeneration projects within a national urban design framework that is based on key design principles, land use planning, public funding guidance, and best practice guidelines; designates home zones by designing streets, reducing speed limits and use traffic-calming measures;

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explicitly plans transport  to reduce car journeys, and continuously increasing the proportion of trips made on foot, bicycle and public transport; tackles empty properties and brown-field areas; recycles buildings; provides housing on brown-field land and in recycled buildings; releases redundant land and buildings owned by public bodies and utilities for regeneration; develops new housing on recycled land in urban areas where housing demand is low; takes action against authorities that consistently fail to deliver planning permissions within a reasonable time period; prevents low-grade temporary uses, such as car parking, of derelict and vacant lands; reduces levels of vacant stock and take action against owners who refuse to sell their properties or restore them to beneficial use; restores and use historic buildings left empty by their owners; facilitates the conversion of more empty spaces over shops into flats by providing additional public assistance, including public equity stakes and business rate reductions; optimises the use of urban space; encourages high-density urban development; prevents excessively low-density urban development; links density standards to design quality; builds on opportunities when stock has strong qualities (water, building of historic quality etc), plans how foods will get to urban areas; ensures digital and tele-communications use to improve urban life; ensures urban information systems maintenance; controls urban sprawl; ensures urban planning; ensures urban water resource management; ensures emergency management and accelerates the change.

Environmental Actions

Urban regeneration removes allocations of green-field land for housing from development plans where the allocations are not consistent with sustainability objectives; retains the general presumption against development on green-fields and designated green belts; designates urban green space in development plans; cleans up land and bring all contaminated land back into beneficial use; prevents site owners from contaminating land; provides site owners with one set of standards, covering contaminated land, water and waste to work to when resolving problems of site contamination; identifies, manages and communicates the risks that arise throughout the assessment, treatment and after-care of contaminated and previously contaminated sites; provides certainty and consistency in the management and sale of contaminated and previously contaminated land; manages the land supply system; reuses brown-field land; clean up brown-field sites; uses waterways for public transport; controls the environmental impact of transport; controls the effect of transport on air quality through air capture and analysis; plans for sustainable transport system; creates comprehensive green pedestrian routes around and/or across each of major towns and cities; gives priority to the needs of pedestrians and cyclists in urban development and highway projects; develops projects that prioritise walking, cycling and public transport; specifies maximum walking distances to bus stops and other public transports; provides cycle storage facilities at stations and interchanges; sets a maximum standard of one car parking space per dwelling for all new urban residential developments; provides bus services to all towns; imposes tougher restrictions on the use of private cars, such as car parking charges and road pricing; encourages patterns of developments, which reduce the need to travel by car; ensures development in highly accessible central urban areas; uses public, less polluting and more energy efficient modes of travel; campaigns for and promotes public transports; reduces the need to travel through use of IT and integrated land-use and transport planning; exploits the advances in IT to restructure cities along sustainable lines; encourages innovation in goods and services, which use fewer environmental resources in use, manufacturing or disposal; ensures waste water management; reduces the amount of untreated waste disposed to landfill and ensure

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that landfill practices conform to acceptable standards; minimises wastes by reusing, recycling, re-selling, recovering usable materials or generating energy from wastes; develops options for process improvements and minimisation initiatives, recycling and assessing the efficiency of all aspects of waste management services; reduces solvent evaporation and emissions; eliminates solvents use and the release of hazardous sludge; increases the use of renewable energy; reduces energy use and produces a renewable source of energy; ensures efficient urban water resource management and ensures Environmental Impact Assessment (EIA) is carried out before any physical development.

Neighbourhood Strategy to improve security

Neighbourhood Strategy is about the coordination of efforts and city-wide approach for regeneration, net overall economic gain, avoid clustering activities in certain areas and decline in others. Community groups need to improve their capacity to engage in local economic development and social initiatives. They need to improve their Skills, Knowledge, Resources and Power and Influence. Thus:

A community must be powerful enough to take actionsStructured community with an established network to assess the actionsSkilful community able to do things properly

Urban regeneration builds upon and develops the potential of skills in the area; builds upon strengths of the members of the community; engages the community in the brown-field projects; develops flagship projects to encourage regeneration; improves housing conditions in poor areas to mobilise the community; fulfils the social and economic needs of local people; allows people to gain democratic control of their cities; gives local people a stake in the decision-making process of neighbourhood management; enables the full involvement of local communities in the urban planning process; reflects the priorities of local people when carrying local environmental improvements and developing community facilities; creates special packages of powers and incentives for authorities and people to assist neighbourhood renewal; establishes single points of responsibility for carrying environmental services devolved to designated estates, neighbourhoods or town centres; appoints caretakers or wardens for social housing estates; allows community groups and voluntary organisations to access the resources needed to tackle derelict buildings and other eyesores that are spoiling their neighbourhood; penalises individuals or organisations that breach regulations related to planning conditions, noise pollution, littering, fly-tipping and other forms of anti-social behavior; ensures every low-income housing estate is properly connected to the town and district centre by frequent, accessible and affordable public transport; prevents gentrification; ensures narrowing of the gap between deprived and wealthy neighbourhoods; develops mixed tenure neighbourhoods and make sure developers have less scope to buy their way out of their obligations to do so; controls the development of ‘social’ housing where there is already over-provision in that neighbourhood; enables more mixed income housing projects to proceed, including use of more challenging planning briefs and discounted equity stakes for low to middle income households in areas where property values are high; allocates social housing not only to accommodate the poor, in unpopular areas; plans, monitors and manages housing demand, to ensure the early correction of an emerging under-supply or over-supply of housing; deals with the social and economic issues of transportation

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projects; improves the use of waterways to revitalise towns and cities, security and crime prevention in cities.

Training and Education

Urban regeneration improves education; provides school buildings, to accommodate future increases in pupil numbers in high quality facilities in regenerating urban areas; trains for skills in demand; carries on existing skills provision and identifies skills gaps; creates skills improvement strategy; improves the skills-base in urban development by joint working between professional institutions, education providers and employers; trains professional staff and trainees by exposure to best practice; promotes the culture of enterprise and innovation; develops a network of regional resource centres for urban development, promoting regional innovation and good practice, co-ordinating urban development training, and encouraging community involvement in the regeneration process; establishes local architecture centres in major cities, fulfilling a mix of common objectives and local specialisms; holds a design competition for all significant area regeneration projects and notable public buildings; provides employment opportunities for all; tackles urban joblessness; creates jobs that engage in producing goods and creates jobs in sectors with long-term growth trends.

Urban regeneration is about optimum provision and location of infrastructure. Urban regeneration is necessary because of the following:

Adequacy of infrastructure Modernism (change is a continuous trend) Global best practice Aesthetic Spectacular Freedom of mobility of shelter and transport Conformity of cities’ development with cities’ growth

Challenges of urban regeneration and sustainable housing in Nigeria

Lack of collaboration among government and built environment professionals Corruption Lack of trust in leadership to develop the nation Bad judicial system Lack of finance to renew the cities Politics Lack of maintenance culture

Inputs of Effective Urban Regeneration

Critical Path Map in urban planning Development Matrix – Finance, Design, Technology, Maintenance

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Sustainable Development – Income level, Age distribution, Culture, Industrial level, Pollution and Waste management.

Consideration for rural-urban drift

Sustainable Housing Development

Sustainable housing can be defined as houses that are affordable; designed and constructed with important emphasis laid on opportunities to save water, waste and energy, and situated on a user- friendly environmentally. Sustainable housing is about housing adequacy which is a situation where the number of houses is more than the number of prospective occupiers (Owners, renters or tenants) (Oyedele, 1991). It is the housing system that meets demands of all residents in terms of services and the environment spiced with spectacular structures. For example, the Rio – Antirrio bridge in Greece, officially the Charilaos Trikoupis Bridge after the statesman who first envisaged it, is one of the world's longest multi-span cable-stayed bridges and the longest of the fully suspended type. The Glass House on Victoria Street, close to Victoria Train Station is a spectacle that attracts million of visitors to London every year.

Sustainability has been with us since time immemorial. This term came to the front burner in 1987 after World Commission on Environment and Development (WCED) and the Brundtland Report 1987. Sustainable housing therefore, has three parameters: (i) must be economical (ii) must be social and (iii) must be environmental-friendly. Sustainable housing shares the following characteristics: (i) affordability (ii) functionality (water, waste and energy use) (iii) concordance (eco-city, that is, the natural setting must be kept as much as possible) (iv) quality (v) adequacy (vi) user-friendly (vii) greenery (viii) public space for social interaction and private space for gardening, exercise and open relaxation (ix) cleanliness (x) peculiarity.

Wildlife species should be part of our environment in order to have a balanced ecosystem. According to Asiodu (2016), “these wildlife species render valuable services in the ecosystem and contribute to the sustainability of the environment but the current protections for wildlife have not been adequate to control demand from many parts of the world for meat and scales believed to have curative powers from the keratin found in them”. In Hong Kong capital, vegetables are farmed in the central business district for sustainability of the city. Urban fish farming is becoming ubiquitous in Johannesburg, South Africa.

English Partnerships and Urban Design is one way of ensuring sustainable housing in England. Through the detailed requirements of the briefs for the development projects in England, English Partnerships aim for the highest standards of design and require their partners - land purchasers, developers or joint venture partners - to meet these standards in order to work with English Partnerships. When English Partnerships assess development tenders for major sites in England, they have adopted an approach which prioritises design and quality over the financial bid and they are prepared to accept the financial implications of this, whereby an insistence upon higher design standards may in certain instances impact on income generated from land sales. In the

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“Millennium Communities Programme”, English Partnerships has the opportunity to influence the industry to raise standards of design and environmental sustainability through “cutting edge” demonstration projects, whilst recognizing the commercial pressures faced by the private developers.

Sustainable housing characteristics include: (i) affordability (ii) functionality (water, waste and energy use) (iii) concordance (eco-city, that is, the natural setting must be kept as much as possible) (iv) quality (v) adequacy (vi) user-friendly (vii) greenery (viii) public space for social interaction and private space for gardening, exercise and open relaxation (ix) cleanliness (x) peculiarity.

Conclusion

Urban regeneration and sustainable housing are inevitable in our built environment due to urban sprawl. Our urban areas are developing at a geometric rate whereas the growth of infrastructures like shelter, roads, schools and hospitals is at arithmetic rate. Urban regeneration is the only method of controlling the growth of cities. Despite the importance of parks, gardens and recreation areas in our living environment, most cities in Nigeria lack these infrastructures. Our communities are not connected with the most sustainable means of transport which is the rail. Waterways are not developed despite the fact that we have rivers, lagoon and sea.

Urban regeneration has successfully being used to redesign cities like London, Malmo, Manchester, Chicago and Philadelphia. Urban regeneration is a renewal programme that involves demolition of decay sites and putting up of modern facilities. It involves great fund and understanding of the stakeholders. It is usually successful where there is opportunity to increase the efficiency and standard of living of the people through employment generation and income-earning capacity. It must be based on value-for-money and the cost recoup from taxes.

All Nigerian cities are decayed and need urban regeneration, especially to redirect the land use ratios. Most cities are not positioned for sustainability as they do not have infrastructures that will enhance their sustainability. It is glaring those cities like Abuja was planned without the input of Nigerian designers as this city did not consider our culture in its design. The markets are not adequate and no provision for shopping malls. Residential streets like Adetokunbo Ademola Street, Wuse II is suffering from succession, gerrymandering and rapidly being turned to shops and offices due to scarcity of these land uses. Mixed Use of land is not practiced and places like Maitama, Asokoro and Wuse II do not have spaces for low income people.

High-rises need to be built as social housing to accommodate the masses and reduce their commute time to work in the city centres. Abuja also needs to be spiced with sculptures and other works of art, artificial lakes and landscape like other cities. Urban regeneration must be employed to have a sustainable city. Urban regeneration is the future of housing design and involves wholesale design and development of houses. Annual sustainable housing conference is also recommended.

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