Leuven and Brussels, Belgium, 23-26 May 2001
COPING WITH INFORMALITY AND ILLEGALITY
IN HUMAN SETTLEMENTS IN DEVELOPING CITIES
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ESF/N-AERUS International Workshop Leuven and Brussels, Belgium, 23-26 May 2001
COPING WITH INFORMALITY AND ILLEGALITY
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| WORKSHOP: HOME PAGE - INDEX of WORKSHOP PAPERS |
Tunde Agbola
- Download the draft paper in *.rtf format
- Download the draft paper in *.pdf format
What is legal or not is a based on the aggregated norms and values of a society, whether such norms are codified or not. Usually, laws are made with the sole purpose of making the quality of life of a society better. It is, therefore, a bad law that is willfully or generally broken either because the people do not understand or relate to it or because it violently disagrees with the original intension of such laws, which is to protect and improve the quality of life of its people. This is why some housingl and human settlement development analysts have chosen to define a slum as a "slum to whom it is a slum." A slum, to urban planners and bureaucrats, is an illegality in an urban landscape which must be removed since it is an environmental and even a security risk. The towns people do not often share this view especially after they have bought the land genuinely according to the existing laws of the country and when it is the responsibility of the municipal authorities to provide essential infrastructure.
This paper examines what constitutes legality and or illegality within the context of the existing Urban and Regional Planning Laws in Nigeria by taking a time dimensional analysis of thelse laws. The paper then takes a penetrating insight into the politics of urban planning and human settlement development in Nigeria and the politicking involved in executing the planning laws with its attendant consequences. A real life example of how "illegality" was converted to 'legality' because of politicking is presented to buttess the fact that sometimes, a thin line separates the two.
The paper concludes with a discussion section which opines that the issue of legality or illegality depends on the political sagacity of the people involved, their ability to collectively appoint (or affiliate with) a political heavy weight, the political climate in the country and the level of corruption of the planning officials, who, in the first instance, determines what is legal or illegal in human settlement development.
N-AERUS: Network-Association of European Researchers on Urbanisation in the South
http://www.naerus.net