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.
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Keywords
Household perceptions; Spatial resilience; Urban Problems; Hazard recurrence; Secondary cities; Collaboration; Disaster Risk Reduction