Unplanned Urban Settlements Fuelling Flooding, Food Insecurity – KNUST Don

Ghana must urgently adopt compact urban development and strengthen land-use planning to tackle perennial flooding, uncontrolled urban sprawl and the rising cost of infrastructure, a planning researcher and Senior Lecturer at the Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology (KNUST), Dr Stephen Appiah Takyi, has said.

According to him, the country’s current pattern of largely unplanned horizontal expansion was putting pressure on land and other environmental resources while increasing the cost of providing roads, electricity, water and other essential services.

Dr Takyi made the observation in an interview with The Chronicle while commenting on the World Bank’s findings on sustainable urban development in Ghana, which advocate more compact development as part of efforts to make cities more sustainable.

He said Ghana’s urban development had largely occurred without a coherent national plan, resulting in the conversion of agricultural lands, wetlands and other spaces into residential areas.

“Some of us are worried about the future of Ghana because we are investing so many resources and proposing so many interventions, but the country is not managed by a plan,” he said.

He explained that compact development involved making more efficient use of available land through approaches such as infill development and high-rise housing, rather than continually extending cities into surrounding areas.

Dr Takyi said such an approach could reduce the distance over which infrastructure had to be extended, thereby lowering the cost of urban development.

“The more you expand, the more you have to expand roads to the various communities, electricity, water and security. So the more you expand, the more the cost of managing the city increases,” he said.

He also linked uncontrolled urban expansion to food security concerns, arguing that the conversion of peri-urban agricultural land into residential development was reducing the availability of farmland around cities.

According to him, this meant that food had to be transported from increasingly distant rural areas to urban centres, potentially adding to food costs.

Flooding threat

Dr Takyi said Ghana’s flooding problems were also closely linked to weak enforcement of land-use regulations, particularly the development of wetlands and other areas that should be protected. “You don’t fill wetlands and sit there and think that your cities won’t flood when it rains,” he said.

He stressed that effective spatial planning could not work without enforcement, arguing that areas designated for schools, parks, industry, agriculture and wetlands had to be protected from encroachment.

He said the problem was particularly acute because residential development had become dominant in many emerging communities, often at the expense of public spaces and social infrastructure.

Housing concerns

Dr Takyi acknowledged concerns that compact development could make city centres more expensive and push lower-income households to the urban fringes. He, however, argued that this would depend on how the policy was implemented.

He called for a clear national housing strategy in which government played an active role in providing or facilitating affordable housing, rather than leaving housing development entirely to private developers. “If the government leaves housing development to only the private sector, they will be pursuing profit-oriented development. That is where it will threaten low-cost housing,” he said.

He said government could designate areas for affordable housing and promote compact forms of development, including low-cost high-rise housing.

Customary land

The lecturer also identified Ghana’s land governance system as a major challenge to compact urban development. While acknowledging the role of customary land ownership, he argued that land-use decisions had to conform to approved spatial plans.

He said the ability of customary land authorities to dispose of land without sufficient regard for wider planning objectives could undermine efforts to protect wetlands, agricultural land, schools and public spaces.

Dr Takyi said the success of a compact-growth agenda would therefore require the cooperation of customary landowners, alongside stronger enforcement by Metropolitan, Municipal and District Assemblies (MMDAs).“We can’t achieve anything if we don’t get a buy-in,” he said.

He further cautioned that promoting the growth of secondary cities such as Tamale and Sunyani would not necessarily conflict with compact development.

Rather, he said, the key issue was ensuring that such cities did not repeat the sprawling development patterns of Accra and Kumasi.

He advocated deliberately planning secondary cities around compact-growth models to prevent them from reproducing the environmental and infrastructure challenges confronting the country’s major metropolitan areas.

 

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