Integrating Attributes of Spatial Resilience Into City-Wide Structure Plan of Secondary Cities In Ethiopia: Perspectives From Kombolcha City, Amhara Regional State
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Date
2022-07-01
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Addis Ababa University
Abstract
According to existing literature, studying secondary cities in the global south can help us better understand spatial resilience in the face of multivariate, intersecting, and uncertain challenges. As a result, this study attempted to investigate the urban uncertainties affecting the spatial resilience of Kombolcha city in Amhara Regional State and develop strategies to integrate the attributes of resilience into the city's structure plan. Exploratory, descriptive, and explanatory research designs were used in this paper. Ex-ante evaluation of the policy documents and post-ante examination of the city's spatial plans were conducted by employing redundancy, diversity, robustness, and integration principles of spatial resilience as evaluation criteria. The thesis deployed document search as a data collection strategy to examine the policy and planning documents governing structure plan preparation in the country: Urban Development Policy(UDP), Urban Planning Proclamation(UPP), Urban Plan Preparation and Implementation Strategy(UPPIS), Structure Plan Manual(SPM), and the first and second Growth and Transformation (GTP I and II) and the two spatial plans: 2001 Development Plan(DP), the 2011 Structure Plan(SP), including 2020 Existing Land Use(ELU) of Kombolcha city. Questionnaires, site observations, base maps, and key informant interviews were also used to collect empirical data. The sample size for the study was 400 households, and thirty-five key informants were purposefully chosen from various institutions. The SPSS, Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP), ArcGIS 10.8, and NVivo 12 plus software were applied to conduct qualitative and quantitative analyses. The study's findings revealed seventeen environmental and physical urban problems affecting the spatial resilience of the country's secondary cities. As a result, household respondents perceived deforestation as the top urban problem, while water scarcity and wind were considered the least recurring urban challenges in the city. Aside from these, the city's spatial resilience was harmed by unsustainable material and resource consumption, poor infrastructure, inadequate transportation, and insufficient response measures. The integration principle was well assimilated into the policy documents, followed by redundancy, diversity, and robustness. GTP I and II received the highest values regarding the policy-specific review, whereas UPPIS got the lowest. The non-spatial resilience of the city is further compounded by poor collaboration among land authority, water, green, and utility management institutions during the urban planning process. The absence of shared planning, task alignment, and public disclosure of achievements has also magnified the reappearance of hazards in the city. However, the study revealed that DRR-related information is being shared by community leaders (21%), family members (40%), community-based organizations(11.60%), and local administrations(Kebeles) (12.50%). The survey results further discovered a relationship and commonalities among the urban problems exacerbated by land-use zoning changes and the thriving informal settlements. In addition, the study depicted that the resilience principles had been inconsistently mainstreamed into the policy documents. Despite the spatial plans' optimistic visions of addressing hazards and anthropogenic pressures, their practical implementation remains challenging. Though the critical system operators were not collaborating, so does the engagement of local administrations in DRR is not uniform and convincing. However, the participation of communities in DRR is encouraging. Therefore, improving secondary cities' coping, adaptation, and governance systems is timely and critical. Furthermore, local governments in secondary cities commit to localizing global initiatives, setting and enforcing strict local resource utilization strategies, and improving living conditions within their cities.
Keywords: Household perceptions; Spatial resilience; Urban Problems; Hazard recurrence;