Participatory e-Backasting Approach for Sustaining Abuja City Visions and Development: Methodological Application
- Country : Nigeria
- Subject : Urban & Regional Planning
Keywords : sustainable city development, participatory e-backcasting, social media tools, master plan and forecasting, action research strategy
Abstract
Current attempts in practise to encourage sustainable city vision, planning and development are failing to make significant advancements and impact particularly in third world countries like Nigeria. Interventions in this area are often based on unsophisticated interactive approach, which oversee the degree to which participatory practices meet with challenges of increasing societal demands and expectations. Against this background there is the need to consider a more radical socio-cultural, technological and organisational innovative participatory approach that fulfil the goals of facilitating daily participatory practices for better enhanced sustainable city development for Abuja the Federal Capital City of Nigeria. In contrast to the conventional master planning approach and forecasting technique used in planning Abuja, this study adopts a prototyped angle to the operationalisation of a step by step participatory backcasting-oriented e-backcasting (pBC) online using action research to developing future scenarios and action plans to recreate a prototyped vision for Abuja. For pBC participation and extent of inputs constitutes the main plan. The participatory process was undertaken under four iterative stages: Platform issues, Re-visioning issues, Participation issues and Timing issues. Through these stages the practical application of e-backcasting began with the integration of social media and non-social media platform such as sms, email, LinkedIn, Facebook, WhatsApp etc. as interactive tools for undertaking the various tasks and recruitment process. A wide range of over 644 persons were targeted and consent sought from within and outside Nigeria. 82 Open and closed tasks guided participant’s inputs. Participants opinions were recorded in different ways: 605 responses were Passive, 899 responses termed active while other responses come under bottom-up or top-bottom category. As a prototype action-research, this paper did not aim for a comprehensive representation of all the residents in Nigeria or in the diaspora. Instead, it aimed at testing the workability of the methodological approach in order to inform future implementation, if proven to be effective. With special reference to online iterative participatory processes and the resultant e-backcasting outputs, it is hoped that such approach can be adapted into governing systems not only for Abuja city but the entire cities in Nigeria. This is believed will depend on the willingness amongst stakeholders participants and those in authority to embrace a radical reconceptualisation of actions towards participation and interactive change to achieving sustainable city development for Abuja.
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