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Kelechukwu Dimkpa and Raymond Iheanyichukwu Mbata
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DOI:10.17265/1934-7359/2026.10.003
Department of Architecture, Rivers State University, Port Harcourt PMB 5080, Nigeria
Nigeria’s estuarine waterfronts illustrate a persistent governance failure in which regeneration is pursued through demolition rather than negotiated upgrading. At Port Harcourt’s Abonnema Wharf, colonial-era mercantile warehouses coexist with a dense informal economy of traders excluded from statutory master plans, both routinely threatened with clearance. While architects have proposed adaptive reuse as a technical solution to decaying heritage stock, the institutional and tenurial conditions required to secure such interventions against future displacement remain under-theorised within Nigerian architectural practice. This paper examines the institutional bottlenecks obstructing sustainable waterfront regeneration and proposes the WCLT (Waterfront Community Land Trust) as a practical governance instrument through which architects can operationalise spatial justice. Drawing on a mixed-methods study combining a structured survey (n = 364) and key informant interviews (n = 26) with traders, planners, and state officials at Abonnema Wharf, the research identifies four principal barriers to regeneration: overlapping federal, state, and local jurisdictions; contested land titles; the absence of statutory heritage protection for industrial mercantile buildings; and fiscal disincentives favouring demolition over reuse. Despite this, 70.3% of respondents expressed strong support for collaborative, negotiated partnerships between state and community. The paper details the WCLT model, a tripartite state, community, and technical governance structure that guarantees un-evictable vendor tenure, caps ground rents, and ring-fences maintenance revenues, translating the abstract principles of the Right to the City into an implementable institutional framework. It argues that architects, as spatial technicians uniquely positioned at the interface of design and governance, have a professional obligation to advance such instruments rather than confining their practice to building-level intervention. The paper concludes that statutory adoption of the WCLT, gazetted under Rivers State law, is the necessary precondition for translating adaptive reuse proposals from architectural aspiration into durable, anti-gentrification urban policy.
Community Land Trust, waterfront regeneration, adaptive reuse, spatial justice, urban governance, informal economy.
Kelechukwu Dimkpa and Raymond Iheanyichukwu Mbata. (2026). The Waterfront Community Land Trust: An Architect’s Governance Instrument for Anti-displacement Regeneration in Port Harcourt, October 2026, Vol. 20, No. 10, 448-460.
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