PLANNING FOR INFORMAL ACTIVITIES

INTRODUCTION

BACKGROUND OF THE STUDY

The Urban settlement over the world witness great influx of people from the rural area. These people move to the urban centres because of the basic infrastructure and services rendered. The white collar job (Formal activities) cannot cater for the increased population; as such, informal activities takes off. These informal activities if not planned and controlled, contravene the provision of the planned Urban settlement.Urbanisation is not uniform; there is huge diversity, both within regions and individual countries. The emergence of huge urban configurations can support regional economic development through improving inter-connectivity and interdependence among cities. Urban Corridors, for example, include the industrial corridor developing in India between Mumbai and Delhi, and the greater Ibadan-Lagos-Accra urban corridor - spanning roughly 600 kilometres linking Nigeria, Benin, Togo and Ghana, and provides the engine of West Africa’s regional economy. On the other hand, these fast growth and rapidly urbanising areas also contribute to unbalanced regional development as a result of strengthened urban primacy (UNHABITAT, 2010).

It is important to remember that despite their economic clout, there are relatively few large urban concentrations. Much urbanisation is actually occurring within a large number of urban centres in Africa, Asia and Latin America that lack the economic, administrative or political status normally considered for classification as a ‘city’ (Satterthwaite, 2002:15). Around two-thirds of the urban population in developing regions are in urban centres with less than 1 million inhabitants (Environment and Urbanisation, 1995, in Grant, 2010), particularly in sub-Saharan Africa. There has been a rise in the number and prosperity of secondary cities across Latin America and the Caribbean in recent years too, showing that smaller cities have capacity to attract new investment away from largest cities.

There is an economic logic to where rapid urbanisation has taken place, and yet, at the same time, most urban growth is driven by natural increase with only about 25% driven by rural-urban migration. Unsurprisingly migration is more significant where countries are urbanising from a predominantly rural context, (East and Southern Asia, sub-Saharan Africa, North Africa and the Middle East). One of the reasons why urban change has been so rapid in recent decades is that it began from such a small base2. Conflict- affected countries and regions have particularly strong urban growth rates,