Environmental Consequences of Rapid Urbanisation: Bamenda City, Cameroon
- 1 Department of Human Ecology, Vrije Universiteit Brussels, Brussels, Belgium.
Abstract
Human settlement conditions in many parts of the world, particularly the developing countries, are deteriorating. Natu-ral hazards now occur right at our door steps and the frequency of occurrence and magnitude of damages that they cause is seen to be on an increase especially in poor urban communities. The natural environment is deteriorating at a rate faster than the rate at which natural occurring processes and resources available within the environment can re-plenish. If left unabated, landslides, flooding, sporadic fire outbreaks, collapse of major road axis, houses and bridges have the potential of plunging urban centre’s into an abyss of environmental chaos. This paper chooses Bamenda city- Cameroon, a rapidly expanding city in the third world as an example. The paper therefore assesses the overall situation of deteriorating urban quality by randomly selecting some of the quarters within Bamenda city that are generally con-sidered as hazard prone. It was noticed that deteriorating urban quality stems from the phenomenon of rural exodus. The situation is further exacerbated by inappropriate systems of land administration, poverty and an overall anarchy and ignorance in the handling of environmental issues. This paper therefore calls for a multidisciplinary and holistic range of approaches to solving present day environmental hazards of Bamenda. It calls for the adoption of modern technology and the systematization of the processes of land acquisition and registration especially at state and local government levels.
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