Single Family Housing Estates Development Dynamics in Port Harcourt Metropolitan Fringe Areas: Implication for Sustainable Urban Planning

Although metropolitan fringe has important role on urban growth process, multidimensional transformation occurring in metropolitan cities has become a subject to different studies. This paper examines the developmental dynamics of single family housing estates in Port Harcourt metropolitan fringe area. The Institutional/Town planning data obtained for the study includes Building Plan approvals/ Building permits in the current Port Harcourt metropolitan fringe areas from 1990- 2010 while the primary data were obtained using hand-held GPS. The paper revealed that after 1990, building plan applications for Obio/Akpor Local Government Area (LGA) began to increase. Within the years 1990-2010, a total of 20,544 plan approvals were made for Obio/Akpor LGA while a total of 6,639 approvals were made for Eleme LGA. When annual distributions are studied, the paper shows that building plan approval began to increase in Obio/Akpor LGA between 1990 and 1993 and reached to the highest point in between 2008-2010. When the building approvals from the two LGAs are studied together, it is seen that Obio/Akpor LGA has the highest development dynamics. The paper further revealed that Housing estates vary in number of houses they involve. Estates that were built 30 to 60 units are 19 (63.3%), 61 to 100 units is 20% (6 estates) and lastly 101 housing units and more is 16.7% (5 estates). The study faulted the Process of establishing single family housing estates without situating and integrating them within the overall urban master plan. It was further recommended that government should among others ensure that majority of the single family housing estates at the fringe areas be built by major building firms and adjust its zoning ordinance and map to provide areas where it will be possible to build relatively lower-cost housing estates such as garden apartments or small houses on small plots for equity sake. Keywords: Single family housing estates, Development dynamics, Fringe area, Sustainable Urban plannin