By Dada Sandra
How do you appease someone that lived and experienced the glory of the past in the various government reserved areas scattered around the country against the rape and nostalgia of the ever-appealing past?
How do you convince someone that grew up as a child with the smell of roses, hibiscus flowers, trees and sometimes fresh fruit and vegetable gardens in their neighbourhoods and compound that his child deserves, instead of the noise and fumes from generators and cars in apartments and terrace houses, as well as, mindless commercialisation of a heritage of decent living left as a deserving legacy to our society by the colonial masters.
How did we justify that our idea of modernity is to destroy our past heritage and replace it with a less enviable and deserving replacement? On what indices can we judge the new to be better than the old?
To gain a clearer insight without being too academic, people live in varied arrangements. In brevity, we can categorise them safely as low income or high density, middle income or light density and high income and low-density neighbourhoods. Each of these neighbourhoods’ addresses different needs that require different facilities and consequently come in different sizes of land, different house types and indeed different building requirement permits.
It follows consequently, while planning, that the peculiar nature of each neighbourhood will demand the kind of road network, nature of municipal power and water supply, drainage and sewage systems etc. To be clear, high-density neighbourhoods emanating from old cities in the Roman Empire adopted the “Grid Iron” system of planning, while the low-density neighbourhoods embraced the concentric city planning methods. Example can be seen in our old city centres (high density area) against our GRA (low density).
What was once sane: There are several reasons for the differentiation of living neighbourhoods in society, but the one that easily comes to mind is the basic economic status of occupants. People are encouraged to live where they can afford. Obviously, the cost of living in a high-density neighbourhood must be less than living in a low-density neighbourhood. It goes without saying that it was a thing of pride in the old GRA to ensure your garden and flowers were very well manicured and a lot of homes retained the full time gardeners, cooks, drivers etc. The high diversity neighbourhoods had similar services, but the areas were more democratized amongst residents and became significantly affordable by each occupant unlike in the GRA that will be the entire responsibility of one occupant. Each of these neighbourhoods had a peculiar social fabric, each left occupants with different experiences. Every one of them has produced largely successful citizens and bad eggs alike.
There is also a further reason to create different neighbourhoods in society; obviously some people require more security than others (like top government personnel and corporate titans) because of the risk that comes with their duties, amongst many others. More so, it is the aspiration of many young people to give their children better than they received.
How then do we address the need for development and growing population in our cities and old neighbourhoods? That should be the logical question that must agitate the mind of government and its citizens. Fundamental to every society is the proper understanding of the needs of its people and the ability to balance it against what is sustainable and in the best interest of society. Nothing compares more than the divergent forces of the centripetal and centrifugal forces while society will opt for less control in pursuit of comfort and economic gain.
Government must concern itself with the fall out and after effect of such demand. Government’s ability to address these depends largely on the propinquity between them and technical and rounded professional advice from experts in the management of the spatial environment.
As society grows in age and population, the need for expansion and gentrification (no more urban renewal) grows. There are intensely professional administrations. It requires study and projections. It seeks to mediate the future based on empirical evidence; it seeks to balance the delicate nature of society. It seeks to adequately provide for each neighbourhood what they need and would need and plan for when it can go through a rebirth in due time. Frankly, we can’t leave this in the hands of the barely informed; the cost to society is way too much.
The old vs the new: Old neighbourhoods should experience upgrade in infrastructure, systemic upgrade in the physical development, maintaining the basic values of old, improving on the quality of life and experience of the people to accommodate population growth. New neighbourhoods should be created (we cannot sweat the old ones) and make them unrecognizable. We must rise up to the challenge and shape the future today. New neighbourhoods are springing up all across the nation, most of them without adequate planning. This is terrible as the consequence is too impactful on people and their environments. Neighbourhood is 60 per cent of value. Good planning is the basic structure upon which value is judged and municipal services provided. If the plan cannot capture the provision of such facilities, the value will erode or be stagnant, people’s investments will suffer.
Most painfully, Ikoyi has suffered a most shameful abuse. In it is the greatest metaphor of our decline as a people and society just like the hope for a better and new Nigeria with an enviable future. It was an ideal neighbourhood. It provided a platform for all tribes in Nigeria to co-exist. It housed schools that have retained proud alumni; it provided recreational clubs and encouraged a work life balance. In essence, this should have been adopted as a template for our future expansion and developments.
Old Ikoyi, new Ikoyi today’s experience: I recently met with an old friend, who was tinkering with moving out of Ikoyi because it no longer felt like what she knew and had grown to love. She no longer felt the serenity and safe haven feeling it used to give. Garden compounds have been replaced with high rise buildings, she could no longer have a peaceful morning down to her car because she shares the elevator with about eight strangers or is it the chaos that is their parking lot where she spends a good minimum of 20 minutes waiting for her neighbours to move their cars so that she can drive out? Oh, and the crazy traffic she faces every time she’s driving out of the neighbourhood!
The streets she used to peacefully jog without a care in the world is now filled with strange cars that she always has to look over her shoulders whenever she’s alone. She was done with it and was ready to move out to at least have some sanity again just because she would give anything not to hear the cries of her neighbour’s babies in the middle of the night. This is a perfect example of what people that lived in the old Ikoyi are feeling, a lot of them would rather move out to smaller gated estates than live with what they have in the new Ikoyi now.
•Dada Sandra, Kingscourt Realtors, Lagos