Retail Shop Outlets in Calabar Municipality: Environmental Challenges to City Dwellers

Abstract

Calabar, the capital city of Cross River State is in the Southeastern part of Nigeria. It is a charming, quiet and peaceful place, and despite the great poverty, the people of Calabar are friendly and hardworking. Calabar is one of the oldest trading cities in Nigeria, set on a hill overlooking the river. It is quite picturesque. Calabar was established as a centre of slave trade by the British in the 17th century; it grew to become one of the biggest. At the end of the slave trade, the city was a major port for Palm Oil trade from the South East of Nigeria. Calabar holds great socio-economic significance in Nigeria. It is a city of great opportunities and enormous possibilities for wealth creation and other human endevours. As a growing and industrializing city, Calabar is faced with major challenges such as balanced land use, land degradation, soil erosion, congestion, overcrowding, infrastructural decay, and a host of other problems. Presently Calabar is witnessing acute land scarcity in its long history; and the demand for such land is on the increase. The challenges currently being faced in Calabar have brought to the fore the fact that human needs must be satisfied on fixed land and development must be located on limited land. Activities have to compete for the use of the best sites for their location; hence the optimal use principle has to be adhered to at the expense of specified space standards and permissible development.  It is in the light of these challenges that this paper assesses the level of compliance to space standards for urban development and development control measures in view of recent indiscriminate erection of retail shop outlets along major streets in Calabar Metropolis. The paper seeks to address this trend and its concomitant effects on the health, safety and beauty of the town and its environs.

Key Words: Calabar; Shop out Lets; Major Streets; Development Control; Congestion; Environmental Hazards and Land Degradation.