A Geographical Analysis of Urban Sprawl in Abuja, Nigeria

Abstract

Urban sprawl is a challenge of the century across the globe; however its greatest impact is felt more in developing countries mainly due to its poor planning and ever increasing population. To ascertain how this affects a notable African city, Abuja, a questionnaire design was employed to elicit resident’s perception on the causes and effects of sprawl in the city. A principal component analysis was performed to simplify the relationship between large bodies of variables involved. This was able to collapse the 14 variables representing the causes of sprawl extracted from the response of the respondents and 9 variables representing the effects of sprawl on the environment and on the residents into significant and orthogonal components that explained the variables in the observed data. Among the nine factors that loaded highly on the components, population was the major factor discovered to be responsible for the sprawl. The analysis further showed the main effects of the sprawl on the city as: loss of biodiversity, high dependency on car, traffic congestion, land degradation, alteration of microclimate, destruction of aesthetics, increasing crime wave, pollution and waste management problems. Adhering to the guidelines on urban development for the city will help the residents not to be prone to the effects of urban sprawl and help to maintain good environmental standards and less spending on maintenance on the part of the government.