Browsing by Author "Oladosu, Gideon Abidemi"

Informal settlements have been widely seen as a challenge to sustainable development programmes in the Global South. Due to their dense informal waterfront settlements with comparable and associated issues of environmental, economic, and social sustainability/justice that surround urban redevelopment and planning, the cities of Lagos and Manila were selected as the study areas. In both cities, the ways of addressing the problems of the informal settlements have remained fragmented. To enhance redevelopment, various planning strategies have been adopted but largely with the same result of forceful eviction and displacement of people, despite differences in how the problems are approached. This thesis utilizes eight (8) published scientific papers relating to urban redevelopment and planning strategies in Lagos’ and Manila’s informal waterfront settlements. The research findings reveal that Lagos and Manila authorities moved to redevelop the waterfront area to ensure environmental protection and reduce natural hazards. These cities adopted public-private partnership to enhance redevelopment and modernize the waterfronts to promote investment, and prevent loss of life and properties. The findings reveal that the top-down planning approach adopted pushed the informal settlers into bad living conditions which is worse than the fear of natural disaster outbreak along the coastline, which the government cited for redevelopment. This generated new ways of politics and democracy where social movements have challenged and protested against the government. The social groups mediate for justice and call on the stakeholders to embrace community-led planning approaches. This thesis concludes that there is a need to have win-win relationships among the stakeholders to have a better planning process. It recommends more research on informal waterfront settlements as it uncovers a wide gap in the literature. In addition, sea level rise was only mentioned without in-depth discussion in Amakihe’s article, to justify the reason for waterfront settlers’ eviction. I recommend future studies to look into the sea level rise as part of the discussion on informal waterfront redevelopment.