Why we want resilient cities— NITP president

The National President of the Nigerian Institute of Town Planners (NITP) Lekwa Ezutah has said the institute is determined to envision future cities that will be resilient to climate change and pandemics.

Ezutah, who spoke exclusively to Daily Trust, said the focus of the 2020 conference of the NITP, due to hold in a week, is ‘Envisioning Nigerian Cities Beyond 2020’.

“We will be discussing what our cities should look like in the future, taking into consideration recent occurrences. For instance, the COVID-19 has changed the way a lot of things are done and it is bound to impact on our settlements.

“So we start looking at what should our settlements look like in the future. We also have this issue of building collapse that is becoming endemic, so to say. So what should we be doing to prevent such occurrences?

“There is this issue of flooding; these things were not very prominent in our settlements before now, but they have now become problems. What do we do to make our cities more resilient so that when these things occur, we can pull back and return to normal? This is what we intend to achieve,” he said.

He stressed that the role of the planner is to ensure cities are resilient since the planner is the one who envisions what the city should look like and where its activities should take place.

“So based on the planner’s training, he should be able to avoid activities that should be subject to some of these environmental problems. For instance, climate change is leading to flooding, so in planning, the planner will take into consideration which areas are prone to flooding and such areas, we usually zone them off.

“They are not supposed to be used for physical development. We normally reserve them for agricultural purposes. We normally reserve them for things like forestry, and not for buildings,” he explained.

When told that a lot of developments on flood plains had been taking place in Nigerian cities, he said, the problem is the Nigerian factor—indiscipline. He insisted that buildings in the zoned off areas do not have the blessing of any town planner.

“There is none that has the blessing of the town planner, otherwise why do we go ahead to pull them down? Definitely in our plans, those areas are labelled as building free zones and they are not supposed to be built upon.

“One of the basic principles in the Abuja Masterplan is that all the natural drainage channels should be respected. But when people now go to build on such areas and the flood comes, they tend to blame the planners. We need a little bit of discipline on the part of the general public,” Ezutah added.