Laura Oviedo 2010-5397 September 22th, 2014

Urban Slums as Spatial Manifestations of Urbanization in Sub-Saharan Africa: A

Case Study of Ajegunle Slum Settlement, Lagos, Nigeria

This article is one of the many studies that tries to present a flash of the immense reality of developing
countries. The main subject of this particular study is slums, which are signs of contemporary
urbanization, that emerge because of the rapid development of urban areas, as a result of large scale
migration from rural. In these informal settlements, new city residents face overcrowding, inadequate
housing, and a severe lack of water and sanitation, typically been the product of an urgent need for shelter
by the urban poor.
Housing in slums is built on land that the occupant does not have a legal claim to and without any urban
planning or adherence to zoning regulations. The lands occupied by slums are not in compliance with
legal, urban and environmental standards set by the public authorities, because they have not basic
technical and social infrastructures and led to visual and physical contamination. Slums are often areas
where many social indicators are on a downward slide; for example, crime and unemployment are on the
rise. Most also do not have easy access to schools, hospitals or public places for the community to gather.
This article also discusses the reasons for causes of informal settlements formations. They classified them
in push and pull factors. Some push factors would be rural poverty and unemployment, and political
personal conflict, while some of the pull factors are the availability of jobs, or relatives/friends in urban
areas who are able to provide temporary accommodation. Basically there are two main reasons why slums
develop: population growth and bad governance. People are coming to cities far faster than the planning
process can incorporate them, and governments take a hostile approach to urbanization by failing to
recognize the rights of the urban poor.
The study gives some things that can be done to prevent the development of new slums. Some of them
are: recognize that urbanization is going to happen and plan for it, and determine where the new residents
will live. Once they feel they have a right to live there, they will begin investing in it, and the area will
upgrade incrementally.
This article illustrates its main subject with a case study of Ajegunle, the most populated slum in Lagos,
Nigeria, has a multi-ethnic population and are of school age and highly, economically productive. Their
main occupation is trading in the formal and informal sectors. This settlement is one with the most
deplorable living and environmental conditions within the city and is characterized by inadequate water
supply, squalid conditions of environmental sanitation, hazardous location, etc The people living in
slums, in a desperate need to cope, engage in all forms of informal activities in order to earn living, secure
shelter and any available service.
At the end, the article concludes that due to the rapid increase in urban populations in Africa, the
corresponding increase for urban housing, the high levels of bad governance, etc, its not possible yet to
every urban dweller in Sub-Saharan Africa to live in a decent house.