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Examination of the Typology of Public Open Spaces in Lafia Town, Nasarawa State, Nigeria

Mr. Bashayi Obadiah and Dr. Bwala Baba Haruna

Abstract

Public open space is one of the key components in urban land use that contribute to improving the quality of life of citizens but this seems to be inadequate in most developing countries. This paper seeks to establish the types and sizes of these public open spaces in Lafia town. The study adopted field observations and direct measurements to ascertain the sizes of the public open spaces and GPS was used to take coordinates of each public open spaces. LandSat satellite images of the study area were acquired from NASRDA. This satellite image was imported into the GIS environment to locate the types of the spaces. All the images were made to pass through processes of image enhancement, Geo-referencing, re sampling, image classification and digitizing. The study revealed that there are three categories of public open spaces (civic, green and quasi-access spaces) in Lafia town with total coverage of 474,851m constituting about 2% of the urban land use which is inadequate and also public open space per inhabitant is 1.7m which is below WHO standard. From this study, the present public open spaces revealed significant reduction in most areas of the different typology of public open space in Lafia town. Therefore, the study recommends that community members including other urban stakeholders who are not experts in planning projects should be educated on public open space management. The study concludes that there should be enforcement compliance of land use management legislation to reduce public open space conversion and encroachment.

Keywords

Public open spacegreen spacestypologyopen space classificationrecreational

References

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