Assessment of Students' Perceptive Image of Zaria Kaduna State Nigeria

Abstract

The paper addresses urban environmental perception by university students of Zaria, Nigeria. The subject was approached from the perspectives of assessing perception of attributes of the urban environment in its functional and aesthetic valuation. Fifty-one undergraduate students of the Urban Planning programme at Ahmadu Bello University were administered a set of questions on the subject in classroom setting. The questions probed their perceptive assessment of the city on the criteria of morphological cognition, aesthetics, image and urban services and infrastructure provisioning. The findings show that familiarity with neighbourhoods is very low, indicating low cognitive character for the city and the respondents' own level of integration in the urban milieu. The findings also reveal a series of features identified by the respondents and associated positively or negatively to the image of the city. The assessment was based on a ten-point environmental perception scale on which the respondents gave low scores for the city on the attributes of environmental aesthetics (0.97/10), services and infrastructure (0.5/10) and overall city image (4.4/10). This shows that the perceptive image of the city is very low. Recommendations were made based on the implications for urban planning and design in Nigerian cities.