Nigeria’s urban population has increased rapidly over the past 50 years
and will continue to grow relatively fast in the coming decades, although
how fast is a matter of some dispute. Nigeria’s urban population (the
urbanisation rate is around 50 percent currently, with an overall
population estimated at 170 million) will nonetheless likely double within
the next 30 years, possibly much sooner.
The growth of Nigeria’s urban population in both absolute and relative
terms has been accompanied by the expansion of existing built-up areas
and the emergence of new and identifiably ‘urban’ settlements.
At the national scale, the most extensive urban spatial expansion has been
concentrated around four massive urban fields:
■ A Northern conurbation centred around Kano, which has a northsouth
axis running from Katsina to Zaria and an east-west axis
running roughly from Funtua to Hadejia;
■ An emergent Central conurbation running from Abuja in the southwest
to Jos in the north-east;
■ A South-Western conurbation stretching from Lagos in the south to
Ilorin in the north to Akure in the east;
■ A South-Eastern conurbation within a roughly square zone
encompassing Benin City, Port Harcourt, Calabar and Enugu.
The underlying cause of rapid urban population growth and urban
expansion in Nigeria is rapid population growth driven by declining
mortality and persistently high fertility: urban natural increase plays a
significant (and possibly dominant) role in driving urban population
growth.
While rural-urban migration also contributes to urban growth, the
significance of urban natural increase and reclassification due to rural
densification have been widely underappreciated while the role of ruralurban
migration has likely been overstated in Nigeria, and indeed subSaharan
Africa (SSA) more generally.
There has in fact been a huge increase in reclassified (‘rural’ to ‘urban’)
settlements (on different definitions, of above 10,000, and above 20,000
inhabitants). These ‘emerging’ towns and cities generally have lower
building and population densities than older, established urban
settlements with accumulated trunk infrastructure, and may therefore
contribute significantly to urban expansion, alongside the ongoing
enlargement of existing urban boundaries.
While rural-urban migration is probably not the main contributor to overall
urban population growth in Nigeria, it nevertheless continues to play an
important role in urbanisation (defined narrowly as the urban proportion
of total population).