Housing enablement in a developing world city: The case study of Benin City, Nigeria

Recent decades have witnessed changes in strategy to housing delivery in the developing world, particularly, for low-income earners. The public housing paradigm has failed to meet the housing need of most low-income households. Subsequently, many national housing policies in line with the Global Strategy for Shelter (GSS) document are adopting the enabling strategy to housing development. The trend towards enablement was boosted by the City Summit (Habitat II) held at Istanbul in June 1996. It is against this background that this paper undertakes a discussion of housing policy changes, and problems and prospects of housing enablement in Nigeria using Benin City, a major urban centre, as a case study. This paper documents the ineffectiveness of government provision of housing in Benin City and in Nigeria as a whole. It identifies some factors affecting housing development such as unsustainable planning and building regulations, poverty amongst urban residents, poor national economic conditions and the resultant inadequate finances. Others include constraints on access to housing finance, plots of land for residential development and infrastructure services. The paper stresses that the extent to which these and related factors are addressed could determine the success or failure of housing enablement strategy in Benin and in other cities in Nigeria and the developing world with similar or related social, economic and cultural characteristics. (C) 1999 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved.