Building resilience is about making people, communities and systems better prepared to withstand catastrophic events. The catastrophes could be natural, climate change-driven, and man-made. The city would be able to bounce back more quickly and sometimes even emerge stronger from those shocks and stresses.
Abuja’s experience as other cities in the sub region is limited to floods, building collapse, some occasionaland localized earth tremors, isolated fire incidences and other emergencies. Some are natural, some mixed with human factors while others among the building collapses and fire incidences are completely products of human negligence and violations of extant rules and regulations.
The Rockefeller Foundation defines resilience as the ability of a system, entity, community or person to withstand shocks while still maintaining its essential functions and to recover quickly and effectively. First among the resilient variables are; Embracing density, diversity and mix of uses, users, building types, and public spaces; Prioritizing walking as the preferred mode of travel, and as a defining component of a healthy quality of life; Developing in a way that is transit supportive.
Others are; Focusing energy and resources on conserving, enhancing, and creating strong, vibrant places, which are a significant component of the neighbourhood’s structure and of the community’s identity; Providing the needs of daily living, within walking distance, which should not exceed 500 meters radius; It should also conserve and enhance the health of natural systems, climate inclusive and areas of environmental significance, and manage the impacts of climate change.
Other variables are ;Enhancing the effectiveness, efficiency and safety of their technical and industrial systems and processes, including their manufacturing, transportation, communications and construction infrastructure and systems to increase their energy efficiency, and reduce their environmental footprint; Growing and producing the resources they need, in close proximity, this should be within 200 kilometers radius.
There should also be active participation of community members, at all scales; Plan and design for redundancy and durability of their life safety and critical infrastructure systems. Planning and design of these systems will aim for levels of redundancy and durability that are commensurate with the increasing environmental, social, and economic stresses associated with the impacts of climate change. Also, building types and urban forms be developed with reduced servicing costs, and reduced environmental footprints.
With the exception of some key resilient urban design variables, in view of the elaborate plan provided for the development of the Federal Capital City, Abuja should have no excuse for failure to resonate with this definition. No doubt the major threat militating against ensuring the city resilience of Abuja is the ongoing massive violation of the city development plans.
Abuja is being developed with a world class andwell-structured master plan in line with the international best standard and practice. Almost all the urban design variables were considered and incorporated. The city development is implemented in stages. Many areas and districts are being reserved notbecause they are not important. But, depending on the availability of resources and the prevailing government priorities.
Among the factor is ensuring the provision of transit facilities. Our case is the provision of the transit way corridor for its future implementation, only to be frustrated with serial violations that threatens its future implementation. The resilience of the city is being challenged.
As veterans and keen observers, we have no doubt that according to the plans, procedures and development requirements, the city resilience will come to bear when the impediment is eventually dislodged. It is the future city demand that would force the implementation of the transit way development.
Similarly, the provision of 33 percent of the city land use budget is devoted to greening in the original city development plan. The city master plan recognizes the importance of its greening for so many reasons. They include ensuring ecological balance to mitigatethe threat posed by global warming, which is considered a grave threat to existence of life on the planet. Greening is also promoted through tree plantings along the streets and stream lines, to deliberate policy of preservation of natural forests, creation of artificial parks for recreation and the planting of trees in all premises within the city.
Greening is also very essential to ensuring visual quality and improvement of aesthetics for the city. Amajor important of the greening not being emphasized or rather neglected is food production through urban agriculture. All these goes a very long way in enhancing the city resilience potentials. Regrettably, the land use and the city development requirements are constantly being violated by the authority itself, irrespective of the adverse consequences the violations portend.
It is a common knowledge that plots are never allocated without assigning a purpose clause, which in turn cannot be known without reference to an approved land use plan for the districts. At the same time all plans are subjected to scrutiny to satisfy compliance with same, prior to implementation. But today the opposite is the case. Due to vested interests, the actual allocation now precedes the procedure for the allocation, at times, it proceeds even the preparation of the land use plan.
The fact is that when land allocation procedure rots, no planner can resuscitate, if the plot’s allocation and the desired use not according to the land use provision was made to stand by the powers that be. The city resilience potentials can only be ensured when the development plans are respected.
