Creating alternative cities for Rural-Urban Migrants in Nig

[Nuruddeen]

A proposed abstract of a paper to be presented at a Confab on Inclusive cities, Johannesburg, South Africa (March 13-14th 2007)"Perspective on Creating Alternative Cities for the Rural-Urban migrants in Nigeria"
                                                     By
                                             Jibo Nura, Nigeria

                                         E-mail: jibonura@yahoo.com

Man's attitude, life style and the environment which he lives, be it rural or urban, is nowadays becoming a subject of concern to the 21st century environmental researchers. In Nigeria, many people, especially youth, move or migrate to the city with hope for a better way of life. They become greatly disillusioned from unemployment, low wages, inadequate shelter, food, housing and accommodation. It is among this category of people that the crisis of expectations is at its apex and the disappointments and frustrations most pathetically felt. However, migration being an adjustive process for relocating factors of production and given the fact that natural resources are essentially immobile, the other complimentary resources notably human factor and capital, tend to move from areas of poor to better endowment. Indeed, while some individuals find in the rural areas the latent resources awaiting activations, others look towards the cities for opportunities for the realization of their life ambition and goals. About 46% of Nigerians are presently living in cities compared to 54% who are rural.   This urban-rural settlement proportion is significant, especially when viewed from the fact that almost half of the Nigerian populace prefer to live in the cities, rather than stay and develop the rural communities. Perhaps, one might find relevance here on why our cities are heavily congested and overcrowded. But nonetheless, accormodation problems due to inadequate house to shelter, land tenure allocation, and lack of housing subsidies etc are all part of the problems faced by the rural migrants in most of our cities. Therefore, rural-urban migration is one of the most problematic issues disturbing the governments in most developing countries. An attempt towards genuine development policy to minimize and/or reduce poverty, overcrowding, housing shortages, diseases, un-employment etc are always hindered by, political manipulation, marginalization and economic instabilities, caused by bad governance and poor leadership in governments? housing policy formulation  and implementation strategies. To curb these problems, however, there is supposed to be balanced growth and development both at the cities and village area in Nigeria. Though, the city would continue to be regarded as a unit of social behavior, which constitutes aggregate of smaller homogenous areas with focused and centralized activities, but its spatial provision is a product of centripetal forces of attraction and congestion, centrifugal forces of dispersion and decongestion, and forces of areal differentiation. Many researchers and a lot of researches towards bringing city development indexes closer to the downtrodden, fail because of poor consideration of suburbanization, decentralization, greater flexibility of location, improvements in technology, effect of local government/grass root policies, and lack of development of sub-centres and periphery in favour  of the core. Indeed, provision of new towns and good infrastructure for people as sustainable means for accommodation and social security can make them forget and not to develop high penchant for urban centres settlements thus minimizing population implosion and growth. This study therefore, is in-tended to use regional research survey guidelines by employing a proforma tool in collating data among the focused groups in Nigeria with a view to providing virile solution

[HUSNAA]

Can you explain what you mean by 'spatial provision' and 'forces of areal differentiation' in the sentence below?
'its spatial provision is a product of centripetal forces of attraction and congestion, centrifugal forces of dispersion and decongestion, and forces of areal differentiation'

[Nuruddeen]

Can you explain what you mean by 'spatial provision' and 'forces of areal differentiation' in the sentence below?
'its spatial provision is a product of centripetal forces of attraction and congestion, centrifugal forces of dispersion and decongestion, and forces of areal differentiation'

Dont get confused Husna.Spatial provision has something to do with space  both inclusive and exclusive in our cities, and  forces of areal diffretiation are conglomeration of forces that are centripetal and or centifugal depending on the direction of the mass and accelarating elements, in this case the migrants.They both depend on the concentration  whether at the centre(urban) or pheriphery(rural). Hope I am understood? In case I am not, feel free I will expatiate further because  we are applying this theory to buildings.