Social sustainability: guidelines for urban development and practice in Abuja City, Nigeria

This thesis presents an explorative study of sustainable urban development practice in Nigeria's capital city, Abuja. The attainment of sustainable development has been a focal point for urban planning researchers and policy makers globally. Despite the Brundtland Commission's report that defined and integrated the pillars of sustainability, the implementation of sustainable urban planning remains a challenge with conflicting perspectives between sustainable development stakeholders through policy programme and practice in developed and developing countries. This research explores the sustainability of Abuja's urban development framework from the triple bottom-line perspective, evaluating current urban planning and experience from both policy and occupant perspectives. Employing qualitative strategies, an ethnographic methodology was used for primary data collection with phenomenology as a theoretical lens for content analysis. Empirical work involved 73 semi-structured interviews that were conducted alongside ethnographic observations; with the resulting data analysis performed using NVivo 11 software. Additionally, archival documents were reviewed, and contributed to the reported findings. The findings highlight social issues as the main area of sustainability challenge with inequalities, urban exclusions, policy inconsistencies, illegal property developments and neighbourhood contrasts as some key outcomes. These factors were linked to public corruption, data limitations and nepotistic practices that created these problems and they highlighted reoccurring defects within the existing policy framework. This thesis contributes to existing knowledge and practice by proffering a set of guidelines for improving social development and practice within the Abuja area. It also contributes to knowledge development in terms of identifying social sustainability challenges and engendering factors in developing nations