Informal Settlements of Port Harcourt and Potentials for Planned City Expansion

Urbanization continues to occur in the Less Developed Countries at alarming rates and with concomitant socio-economic problems whose solutions are beyond the capacities of most LDC governments. In Nigeria, cities are growing at an average of 5.8% per annum. Port Harcourt, one of the major ones and centre of the country s oil and gas industry is growing largely through unregulated transformation of indigenous enclaves at the periphery, where an informal land market exists aimed at side-tracking the provisions of a 1978 Land Use Act, which vested land rights in the state and sprouting of squatter settlements on marginal land along the city s waterfronts. As a result of the resistance to the Land Use Act, which could have been utilized for large-scale public land banking for development, the 49 squatter settlements of the city have the potential to yield land for planned extension of the city, thereby guaranteeing security of tenure for residents and improving living conditions.