Urbanisation an inevitable choice

WE are starting to see the effects of over-population and overcrowding in our major urban centres.
In the nation’s capital alone, the unregulated growth of squatter settlements and other unplanned residential areas is, as we all know, exerting pressure on the city’s municipal authority and businesses to provide services – health, education, employment and housing – that make living in an urban environment possible. The trend can also be observed in Lae and Mt Hagen.
What many Papua New Guineans are ignorant or unaware of is that if people continue to flood into the three urban settings and city planners, provincial and national governments do little in the way of planning to change the trend, these places will reach saturation point where anarchy, mayhem and chaos will reign.
The percentage of urban dwellers stands at about 15% (1.2 million) of the total population. This will increase over the next decade. However, the host centres to cater for this increase will be the same.
Port Moresby’s road infrastructure was tested recently with heavy rain damaging major roads. This highlighted just how easily fissures in the capital’s road network could impact everyday life. Traffic congestion was amplified overnight.
In Lae, the traditional landowners have pressed the Morobe government for a greater say in the use and commercialisation of their land. The influx of settlers from the Mamose, New Guinea islands and highlands regions has seen Lae’s settlement population constitute more than half the city’s populace.
Mt Hagen’s problems are not just the fact that its numbers are increasing but that, due to the nature and attitudes of the people from Western Highlands and the other highlands provinces, a potentially volatile environment has been created. It is not uncommon for violent clashes between ethnic groups to break out. Port Moresby, Lae and Mt Hagen have all borne the brunt of them.
Since the country’s main legislative, manufacturing and business hubs are located in those cities, it is not an inconceivable notion that one day in the near future, the nation could be brought to its knees if they are left to develop and expand without a clear strategy and policy to control and direct that growth.
The country quite simply needs an urbanisation policy that deals specifically with this issue.
Urbanisation means turning a place or places into urban centres complete with the prerequisite services and amenities.
We obviously need more cities and towns to provide what the top three urban centres are currently being required to do. This is a way to develop the country and keep the population evenly distributed so that every citizen can have access to goods and services that are now not easily within reach. And it was with this end in mind that on June 20, 2010, the National Urbanisation Policy (NUP) was adopted by the Somare government.
According to the policy, NUP is a framework and plan designed to strengthen the economic, social, and environmental fabric of PNG’s towns and cities by better managing the urbanisation process and urban growth challenge. The precursor to NUP can be traced back to 1973 when the country’s first policy dealing with urban issues was developed in a paper on “self-help housing and settlement for urban areas”.
In 1977, the national planning office facilitated a paper on “managing urbanisation in PNG”, which was a significant contribution to the process of gaining and consolidating political independence. Unfortunately, little in the way of implementation occurred due to a lack of political will and institutional leadership in the 1980s and 1990s. The issue saw some prominence at the turn of the millennium with Moresby South MP Dame Carol Kidu raising urbanisation and its management as a matter of national concern. Consequently, it had taken a decade for the government to finally endorse the NUP.
But we are hopeful that it will equip and fund the Office of Urbanisation to begin directing the overall strategy outlined in the policy. The management of urbanisation in PNG remains problematic. There is much talk about the wider urbanisation process, with the impacts and consequences of such change increasingly visible for all to see but the problem must be viewed in its entirety and not just from a region to region or province to province basis.