Abstract
Development control is one of the principal functions that city governments in Malawi play. Development control is a process of ensuring that urban development complies with policy guidelines, planning regulations, standards, approved physical development plans, Local Authority by-laws, as well as other relevant statutes. Research has shown that although legislative frameworks exist, Malawian cities continue to experience a high rate of unauthorized developments as evidenced by an explosion of unplanned settlements, increasing demolitions of illegal structures, and increasing urban renewal programs. One of the contributing factors to this urban challenge is the weak development control and enforcement mechanisms implemented by city governments. Therefore, this study was conducted to assess the feasibility of integrating drones into the urban development control system to augment the existing mechanisms. We assessed whether drone technology is feasible for conducting development inspections and tracking unauthorized and/or illegal developments in residential areas of Lilongwe City, the capital of Malawi. The feasibility assessment was done on two aspects. Firstly, we reviewed regulatory frameworks that guide drone operations in Malawi to understand if such regulations are enabling to allow for drone integration into urban development control. Then, we assessed the perceptions of various stakeholders in urban land management, such as land developers/ city residents, urban planning officials, and civil aviation authorities toward the proposed drone integration. We relied on both primary and secondary data to achieve the research objectives. Secondary data was collected through desk research while primary data was collected through interviews and surveys. We used Microsoft excel to tabulate responses and perform data analysis.
The results of the feasibility assessment revealed that Malawi is one of the few countries in Africa with very enabling drone regulations. We established that the drone industry is booming in Malawi and there is a growing rate of drone adoption, especially in the humanitarian sector. There are a lot of experiences of drone applications to learn from and therefore, we concluded that the proposed drone integration is very feasible from a regulatory point of view. On perception assessment, we found that both aviation authorities (Department of Civil Aviation) and planning officials from Lilongwe City Council and the Ministry of Lands, Housing, and Urban Developments perceive the proposed integration as very feasible and are willing to spearhead its implementation. Eighty eight percent of the interviewed planning officials agreed that introducing drones for inspection would improve efficiency in their enforcement routines. For land developers, few expressed some concerns with the drone’s potential to intrude on their
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personal privacy. However, the majority (76%) were willing to allow the drones to fly in their area of residence if they were informed prior to conducting such flights. Given these findings, we have concluded that drone technology is feasible for tracking unauthorized residential developments. Therefore, we recommend that city councils in Malawi partner with other entities such as academic institutions, research institutes, and technology providers to roll out a pilot project for drone integration. The proposed integration should begin with a pilot project to test the drone capabilities on a smaller scale before full integration to allow for the identification of challenges, refining processes, and demonstrating the benefits to various stakeholders within the built environment sector and beyond.
Keywords: Drones, drone integration, development control, Lilongwe City, Malawi