Urban Growth and Land Degradation in Developing Cities: Change and Challenges in Kano Nigeria

This book offers a fluent and stimulating contribution to ongoing debates around resource management in politicized peri-urban environments. It will be of considerable interest to a wide readership in development studies, environmental management, geography and related disciplines.Dr Gina Porter, University of Durham, UKThe peri-urban interface in poor countries is frequently an area of great dynamism and a focus of competition for basic resources. In Nigeria, peri-urban livelihood strategies have become an increasingly important survival mechanism in the context of rapid urban growth. This book uses an innovative combination of methodologies from both the natural and social sciences to examine recent developments in and around the city of Kano in Northern Nigeria, and in doing so, provides insights into the sustainability of these liveihood strategies. Identifying some of the most significant forces that are currently shaping the process of peri-urban change, it argues that, despite the farmers' adoption of creative and ingenious strategies, the sustainability of a once apparently resilient system is starting to break down.Although the case study considered is one of locality, the findings have much wider lessons and are transferable to other burgeoning Third World cities where increased pressures on urban hinterlands have intensified contests amongst various actors, made access to resources much more difficult and made traditional smallholder mechanisms of adaptation and resilience increasingly challenging.Contents: Preface; Glossary of Hausa terms; Introduction; Sustainability, land degradation and peri-urban expansion; Historical background to farming in the Kano close-settled zone; Land, soil and sustainable livelihoods; Urban pressure and woodland degradation: perceptions of tree cover change in the Kano close-settled zone; Water quality, urban waste and sustainability; Sustainability challenged?: seeing beyond Kano's 'political ecological footprint'; Bibliography; Index.About the Author : Dr Roy Maconachie is a Research Fellow at the Institute of Development Studies, University of Sussex, UK.