Community Approach to Growing Greener Cities through Self-help Street Horticultural Gardens: A Case Study of Lagos, Nigeria

The study examines residents’ concerns in greening their communities though self-help initiatives (SHI) carried out by individuals who utilise road set-backs to plant street horticultural gardens (SHG) in Eti-osa Local Government Area, Lagos, Nigeria. It purposefully administered questionnaire to managers of all SHG in the study area to establish their socio-economic characteristics, contributions to community greening and motivating factors behind their SHI. The study found that the horticulturists were nearly males (93.7%), young adults (54.0%), earning about three dollars per day (63.6%), have been in practice for more than four years (79.3%) and altogether using about 1.5% of land in the study area for SHG. A good number of them have contributed to voluntary greening of their communities through planting of trees (76.2%), hedges and shrubs (47.6%) and flowering plants (65.1%). The horticulturists’ Motivating Index (HMI) employed to know why they went into the practice revealed that they (51%) were moved by the depreciating state of urban green (HMI=2.55) and feared (46.4%) the impending ecological doom on the built environment due to lack of sufficient green space, causing global warming (HMI=2.32). This could be why the linear regression test of the preference of social to economic value of the practice of SHG in the study area has its R2 to be 0.219. This means that SHG in the area did not necessarily bring positive economic value to the horticulturists as the social value embedded in it. This study is a prove that literature and publicities on environmental effects of global reduction in green space seem to be yielding positive results in Africa as some individuals in the study area are taking into self-help initiatives in community greening, even where land seemed very scarce for such development. It concludes that literature on the subject should be more encouraged.