NIGERIAN SPRAWL

Nigerian Sprawl
Nigerians may be laid-back, and that is something that I like basically, in the sense of being relaxed and easy going. That kind of attitude does not necessarily take away a sense of responsibility, duty, and paying attention to others. With Nigerian sprawl I do not mean the way a person is slumped in a comfortable chair. The younger generation not least, in any country, would certainly know how to do that. What I am after is what has become called urban sprawl, the ‘disorganized expansion of an urban area into the adjoining countryside’.
I saw a lot of such urban sprawl while in Nigeria, in fact almost all urban areas I went through was of such a nature. That says pretty little about the country as a whole, and I understand that the capital Abuja for example is something altogether different.
Be that as it may, the fact that I have seen just a fraction of Nigeria, I still want to reflect briefly on the phenomenon as such. Probably there are two factors that speed up this very development, the existence of motor vehicles and the emergence of large shopping malls. They are not unrelated. A world wide phenomenon is that less and less people walk a street, either for leisure or for shopping. In Africa the poor would definitely have to do it, but not the rest, to be sure.
This easily creates an inhuman and hostile kind of urban environment. People are becoming more and more gated and walled in. Inside the walls there are many things put in place in an orderly way. The hotel I stayed in for two nights in Port Harcourt was well equipped and well decorated, but from the street you saw absolutely nothing. The wall was too high for that and I cannot imagine even one hotel guest walking from the street into the hotel property. It was all set for cars, cars…
Interestingly enough the governor of the province had started a campaign to reduce the high walls. This I was told by Father Modestus who drove me to one of the banks. They had now statistics showing that the high walls only increased people’s insecurity living behind them. A crime, a kidnapping could not be seen from outside by anybody else.
Urban sprawl is a phenomenon that reflects human society in a particular way and there must be ways by which one could affirm it as well as suggest how one could make improvements. What concerns me is the tendency to give no or little room for freedom of movement for human beings, not just for automobiles. Where are the parks, safe ones that is, where are the sport facilities in ordinary residential areas? How do we dismantle the shopping malls and recreate ordinary streets with small size shops that are easily reached by pedestrians on their way home from work?
In the end, there is a definite charm with urban sprawl. It is not planned but partly because of that contains a human element. If the car traffic could be held at bay, at least to some extent, one would find an endearing closeness between buildings, large and small, tall and low lying, and humans in and out of them to and from the street or other open spaces. It must be a challenge in a life time for any town planner to come to grips with urban sprawl without destroying the human element built into it. I would believe that Nigeria is one such place where such planning is and will be undertaken, with the view to taking various local human and cultural expressions into account.