Urban Planners: Reps Harp on Need for Adequate Urban Planning

The House of Representatives Committee on Urban and Regional Planning, has harped on the need for adequate planning of urban cities, as doing so will help address insecurity and other challenges.

The Chairman of the committee, Hon. Awaji-Inombek Abiante made this remark in his address during an inaugural meeting of the committee, but bemoaned that there have practice of breaching the original plans of many urban cities.

Abiante said, “If our cities are properly developed, well planned, issues of disasters, issues of emergencies would be reduced. Issues of identifications would be improved because persons can be tracked to the very last location that they are.

“But what we find, what we have are cities lacking the very basic, relative planning for development.

“In areas where there has been seeming semblance of planning, development have not been according to plans. Areas where development have even reached, there have been cases of several distortions. There have been cases of conversions. Areas are designated as residential; people convert them to be commercial or even industrial. It negates, and would continue to negate the essence of planning and urban development.

The lawmaker stated that slums have continued to spring up because of the challenges, adding “It would be in our place to bring our experiences, and to bring our knowledge to bear, to support government, to see how these can be redeveloped and upgraded beyond what they are called today as slums.”

He called on his colleagues in the committee to prepare for the tasks ahead.

Additionally he said  “We are not strangers to the activities of parliament. We are also not strangers to the issues of development I seek your support, as it is my hope that each and every one of us will bring to bear, the individual expertise and wealth of experience to help steer this committee in the right direction.

“All hands should be brought on the desk as we work towards the same goal, the simple goal of enhancing the status of our urban areas . An enhanced urban city should be able to guarantee security, should be able to guarantee uptimisation of facilities that are available . It should be able to guarantee the quality living for the people, should be able to guarantee that in terms and times of emergency, response can get to our people on time.

“Details of our challenges, our responsibilities are enshrined in our defined areas of jurisdictions in our Standing Orders. It is our intention to continue to liaise with various agencies, ministries and departments of government. Our development, as far as we would want to contribute to the urban cities, we want them to be inebriated from the point of conception, the point of initiation.”