ABSTRACT
SUMMARY: The concept of sustainable development has raised the spectre of possible exhaustion of vital resources at costs to posterity. This has called for measures to impose discipline on the way resources are used. At the same time, Africa has the added obligation to half the number of its inhabitant living under extreme poverty by 2015. These concurrent goals, from the urban land use perspective, appear at odds. The pursuit of poverty requires intensive and extensive resource usage and yet sustainable development, when taken to the extreme may be opposed to such use. How can a delicate balance be achieved in this conundrum in an impoverished region like Africa?
