Evaluating the Main Challenges to a Sustainable Physical Environment in Benin City

N Onwuanyi,E.P Ojo

doi:10.36263/nijest.2021.01.0268

Abstract

In the shaping of cities as physical environments, planning governance is a principal factor which has sustainability implications for the entire urban system. This suggests that planning governance is a factor which has the potential to contribute to the occurrence of environmental challenges as well their resolution. Nigeria’s cities are facing many environmental challenges which constitute threats to sustainable development. This paper examines the main challenges to the development of a sustainable physical environment in Benin City, Nigeria’s ninth largest urban centre by population. Relying on archival records and observation, the study evaluates the city’s major physical environmental problems and their connection with planning governance; and thereafter, undertakes a comparison of planning governance features in the city with practice in the now sustainable, but once unsustainable environment of London City. The findings are that planning governance exerts a critical influence on the sustainable urban physical environment as in London City; that Benin City’s weak planning governance (as manifested by the absence of a master plan, inadequate personnel and equipment, a low public awareness of planning laws, a low level of compliance and a general lack of enforcement) is contributory to the emergence and subsistence of its environmental challenges. The conclusion is that the subsisting environmental challenges of Benin City are rooted in planning governance which, as presently run, lacks the capacity to achieve a sustainable physical environment. It is recommended that the city be re-directed to a trajectory of sustainable physical development through sweeping changes in planning governance and public enlightenment.

Highlights

Human settlements are physical spaces which have been adapted from their natural state
The study further stresses the connection between planning governance and a sustainable physical environment by comparing the study area with London City, using the latter as an example of an environment once characterised by unsustainable development, but which has a sustainable physical environment
This paper set out to evaluate the main challenges to achieving a sustainable physical environment in the modernising and urbanising space of Benin City

Summary

Introduction

Human settlements are physical spaces which have been adapted from their natural state. The urban physical form is created for the provision of space for living, working and recreation (Lohmann, 2006) for which purposes all urban land needs must be accommodated as a cardinal principle of planning design(Keeble,1982). These needs are arranged to achieve complementarity, the separation of incompatible land uses and allowances made for the effect of topography and ecology on the urban form (Keeble, 1982). The land use pattern influences the quality of the physical environment and its capacity to sustain human activities which, if uncontrolled or unmonitored tend to produce

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Conclusion