Urban Regeneration and the Challenge of Informal Settlements

At the 3rd session of the United Nations Conference on Housing & Sustainable Urban Development (Habitat III), the National Union of Tenants of Nigeria will, in collaboration with Government of Rivers State, organize a networking event to examine a key urban challenge of the century and underscore an innovative solution to the challenge. Urban Regeneration, being the title of the networking event, cannot be properly understood without recourse to a full orbed analysis of the characters of slum. In fact, the main title of the event, which is fine-tuned to “urban regeneration and the challenge of informal settlements” is intricately connected with human settlements challenge being a development that makes cities socially unwelcoming and mitigates the attainment of inclusive, safe and resilient cities objective of the SDG. The event, therefore, intends to showcase a contemporary approach to slum-mitigation – using the Greater Port Harcourt City Development Project as a centre of reference for good practice Idea of the event is hatched from the fact that slums have been established as a glaring vestige of urban exclusion and could be diagnosed as suffering from a combination of ailments connected with inadequate housing and poor urban governance if viewed from the clinical lens. Slums are found to be a ubiquitous factor in developing countries while the proportion of urban population in Africa and Asia that lives in slums is fantastically high. It has been further established that population pressure on affordable housing extravagantly accounts for the increased level of slum-formation which could be tracked to “one-city” policy of development. Under the policy, basic infrastructure projects, including housing, are profligately centered at the capital cities, living the rural centers destitute of such projects. This has led to massive population flee from rural communities to capital cities to explore the benefits of basic infrastructures thereat.