Don’t use cinema halls as churches’

AN architect has called on metropolitan, municipal and district assemblies to institute bold and pragmatic measures to check the practice, where cinema halls are converted into churches and places of worship.

Professor Ralph Mills-Tettey, an architect and consultant, said the practice, which has become a fashion in most urban centres, has the potential of undermining the original physical planning schemes of the areas.

Professor Mills-Tettey made the call, when he presented a paper on "A built Environment For Human ~Habitat in Ghana: Emerging issues" at the Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology (KNUST) Golden Jubilee inter-faculty lectures organised by the Faculty of Environmental and Development Studies in Kumasi on Friday.

He said locating churches in cinema and video halls contravenes the planning and development regulations of the metropolis, since the areas were originally not zoned as places of worship but rather for entertainment.

Professor Mills-Tettey, an alumnus of the KNUST, also proposed to metropolitan assemblies to rigidly enforce the national building regulation, which stipulates that buildings to be put up in metropolitan areas should be designed by architects.

He said this is crucial since that is the surest guarantee for ensuring orderly physical development and the enhancement of the environment in the metropolis to avoid turning the urban centres into slums.

Professor Mills-Tettey expressed regret that although such a regulation exists, the inability of metropolitan authorities to enforce it has made most developers to take advantage, using the services of "self-styled draughtsmen or masons", saying in Accra, less than 10 per cent of buildings were actually designed by architects, as the regulation demands.

He said metropolitan, municipal and district assemblies collect development charges from developers and property owners only to divert such funds and treat them as traditional revenue, which are used for their recurrent expenditure.

Professor Mills-Tettey reminded the assemblies to re-examine the law governing the collection of such development charges and to use them for the provision of infrastructure and services, in accordance with the regulation.