Domestication of the Urban and Regional Planning Law in Nigeria: The Cross River State Experience

The Urban and Regional Planning Law in Nigeria was enacted, and introduced three levels of physical developments to be supervised by the Commission, Board, and Authority. The Board particularly, was to be constituted by the State Governor and charged with the responsibility of controlling physical developments within the State. This study is aimed at evaluating the technicalities involved in domesticating the Urban and Regional Planning Law in Cross River State with a view to ensuring guided physical developments. This was done by examining policies of the institutions of government and the professional bodies towards domestication of the Urban and Regional Planning law. The study also examined various activities of the agencies of government that have involvement in domesticating and possible implementation of the law for the past 20 years. The study adopted a longitudinal survey method spanning across 20 years (from 2003 to 2023). Both primary and secondary sources of data were used. The primary sources of data were sourced from focused group interviews from professionals and town planning officials in the Ministry and the state legislators. Secondary sources of data on the other hand, were sourced from journal articles, test books, periodicals and government gazetted documents to supplement the primary data. Findings of the study show that government of Cross River State is technically uninformed about the fundamentals of conceptualizing the Urban and Regional Planning law. The legislative arm of government has consistently remained unwilling to pass related bills into law and deliberately shifted grounds from enunciating the relevance of the Urban and Regional Planning Law to physical development in Cross River State. The study, therefore, recommended that the NITP/TOPREC should take up these concerns by compelling the Cross River State Government and its agencies to take responsibility of conceptualizing and advancing extant policies that would enable awareness and promulgation of the Urban and Regional Planning law. Town planning practice in Cross River State has been on very low ebb and would only improve if the Urban and Regional Planning Law is made popular to all stakeholders in physical development. Finally, conceptualizing and domesticating the Urban and Regional Planning Law would serve as perspectives and catalysts that underpin the improvement of professional planning practice in Cross River State, Nigeria.