What is the relationship between the built environment, social interaction, crime, policing, and resident experience? Patience Adzande seeks to answer these connected questions through an examination of Makurdi, Nigeria, by showing the limits of urban planning and insufficient infrastructure—including lapses in formal policing. These shortcomings have left many residents to create their own “territorial markers”—including constructing walls and fences—which have had significant impact on social interaction with and experience of the urban space, often not achieving the deterrence in crime residents sought. Adzande’s contribution to the “Layered Metropolis” series offers sobering analysis of the limits of formal urban intervention at the same time that it offers some prescription for policy for an improved future in the lives of city residents.
Patience Adzande
Patience Adzande is a lecturer in the Department of Urban and Regional Planning, Benue
State University, Makurdi, Nigeria, where she also obtained her PhD in urban and regional
planning. While working on her PhD, Dr Adzande received two research grants from the
SSRC’s Next Generation Social Sciences in Africa Program’s Dissertation Research
Fellowship (2013) and Dissertation Completion Fellowship Award (2014). Her doctoral
research focused on the influence of the built environment on the pattern of crime in
Makurdi, Nigeria. She has an interest in issues associated with human security in cities and in
rural areas. In 2015, together with some colleagues, they received a CODESRIA grant to
conduct research on the role of local institutions in building peace between pastoralists and
farmers in parts of Africa. She is also a recipient of the African Peacebuilding Network grant
(IRG 2017). Her APN research examined the current peacebuilding strategies used in the
management of conflicts between farmers and pastoralists in Nigeria. In 2019, she
received a University of Edinburgh Catalyst Fellowship, which enabled her to share some
findings from her APN sponsored research at the European Conference of African Studies in
Edinburgh. She was also selected as an African Studies Association Carnegie Corporation of
New York Scholar in 2019.