We need comprehensive land use strategy – Ardayfio-Schandorf
Emerita Professor Elizabeth Ardayfio-Schandorf, Past Vice President, Arts and Sciences, Ghana Academy of Arts and Sciences (GAAS), has asked policy makers to provide a comprehensive land use and regional growth management strategy to avert unsustainable growth and its attendant negative impacts on families.
She said such a policy should focus on densification and intensification strategies in core metropolitan, areas, aimed at securing inter-city and low-income housing areas that provided more affordable housing for the ordinary family.
She suggested that the informal sector should also be integrated into the formal regional and public health planning system.
“As the challenges imposed by urbanization to urban families are intractable and multifaceted, families and individual citizens equally have permanent and relevant roles to play in so far as the urban environment is concerned,” Emerita Prof Ardayfio-Schandorf said in her second presentation at the GAAS JB Danquah Lectures (Series 54) in Accra.
“All family, household heads and all should be conversant with the rules and regulations of their respective municipal and local authorities so that they could comply with them at all times,” she said.
“Families should equally uphold the positive indigenous values of decent living and purposively promote and practice family stability values and efficient environmental management.”
The JB Danquah Memorial Lectures Series was instituted in 1968 in memory of a Foundation Member of the Academy, Dr Joseph Boakye Danquah, who died in prison in February, 1965.
JB Danquah was a lawyer, philosopher, scholar, novelist, dramatist, politician and a journalist.
The event consists of a series of three lectures delivered by either a Fellow of the Academy or a distinguished non-Fellow.
Speaking on the topic: “The Family and Urbanization and Development”, Emerita Prof Ardayfio-Schandorf said in recent times, the family had attracted increasingly more attention.
That, she said, was due to the critical role it played in development and the enormous transformations that had taken place in social interactions, creating formidable challenges that increased pressures on the family.
She said governance issues, high unemployment rate, inadequate social security mechanisms including rural-urban migrations were disintegrating the family.
“Pandemics like HIV/AIDS and recently, the COVID-19 are compounding the unprecedented strain on urban families,” Emerita Prof Ardayfio-Schandorf said.
She said addressing the challenges effectively required an integrated approach that placed the family at the core of a comprehensive development agenda, aimed at sustaining its integrity and viability.
She mentioned that among the greatest impetus for transformations in the family, was the changeover in the country from subsistence to cash crop farming, which generated job mobility, long before the onset of industrialization.
She said the twin forces of colonialism and missionary evangelism, independent of industrialization, were strong factors transforming the indigenous family.
Emerita Prof Ardayfio-Schandorf said perhaps, even of greater import for family, was the fundamental alternation and power structure of the African people, imposed by colonial administration and education; saying laws hostile to family indigenous practices rocked the foundations of the family.
She said together with globalization and missionary activities, formal education had been an effective channel for cultural diffusion.
“It did not only open up the horizon of knowledge, but also diffused its tremendous impact on the structure of the family in Africa long before those of industrialization,” she said.
“Despite the important roles these played in disorganizing and destabilizing the indigenous Ghanaian family, it is widely accepted that the single most fundamental process that has transformed the family is urbanization.”
Emerita Prof Ardayfio-Schandorf said with the emergence of gated communities and urban enclaving, it was uncertain to predict the trajectory of spatial patterns of urbanization and the character of individual metropolitan areas which might accommodate urban families.
She said scholars had proposed that with the type of development, Ghana was likely to produce an urban society with a double face.
One would be characterized by world class residential areas equipped with solid infrastructure and services that would be inhabited by the upper and the middle-class families like the gated cities of Regimanuel Estates or Appolonia City.
The other would be teeming cities composed of informal settlements, overwhelmed by the pressures of excessive congestion, inadequate sanitation, waste management and poor housing that would be mainly inhabited by low-class and poor families.
She said the proliferation and growth of gated cities and satellite communities, engendered further urbanization and more splintering and more inequalities.
Source: GNA