Challenges of Mega Cities: Lessons for Evolving Sustainable Nigerian Cities

Abstract

The current Millennium Development Goals call for a re-thinking of city development cooperation as majorly urban. This article builds upon the lessons learnt from existing modern day megacities. It dwells upon the events that were triggered by urbanization leading to the modern day mega cities and their challenges in the process of evolving more sustainable structure in the 21st century. The ideas herein are important for young developing cities in Nigeria where urbanization is already ravaging the spaces that are left for development as well as generates ideas for existing megacities like Lagos which ranks in the first 25 largest cities in the world. Urban development has long suffered diminishing effects due to majorly unsustainable initiatives and paucity of innovative solutions in planning and development in Nigeria. Mega cities’ ecological footprint as well as their socio-economic and political impact often goes further than comparable medium states. Megacities, which function with the anchor country concept and understood as anchor cities in the context of urbanization, possess huge potential for sustainable regional development, which yet has to be realized and addressed by Nigeria’s development initiatives. This paper observes the trends and challenges in modern day Mature and Transitional mega city development, and highlights ideas which Nigerian cities can employ to successfully influence sustainable mega urban development.