International records / OpenAlex research

Kainji resettlement housing: 40 years later

Nigeria's Kainji Dam, completed in 1968, displaced 44,000 people from 239 settlements. Three housing forms were designed to provide for urban, semi‐urban, and rural settings, respectively. Forty years later, the urban and semi‐urban forms are integrated into the community while the rural form, modeled after a grain storage structure (rumbu) has been less successful. Five lessons are derived from this scenario: cash compensations are an inappropriate strategy for resettlement; traditional institutions are vital to the success of the process; designs must be relevant to the locality; new housing…