Technology has brought about rapid changes in urbanisation, from smart cities to data-driven urban choices in the West. Still, urbanisation presents a unique set of challenges and opportunities for places like Nigeria, particularly Lagos state. While the West entertains conversations around smart cities, countries like Nigeria cannot afford to do so. Lagos in 2024 still grapples with popularly critiqued low-budget issues like inadequate water supply, waste management, transportation, and electricity.
In places other than the Western world, instead of smart cities, technology should be leveraged to tackle these critical urban challenges thus providing a blueprint for sustainable urban developments in contexts where the barest minimum infrastructure is often found lacking.
Challenges
According to Statista, roughly 15.4 million people lived in Lagos in 2022, making it the most populous and largest city in Nigeria. However, this feat does not come without its downsides such as:
- Access to Clean Water: Many residents do not have access to clean water and adequate sanitation, leading to health issues and high costs for informal water sources especially in places such as Lekki.
- Waste Management: Lagos is said to produce an estimated amount of 13 million kilograms of waste daily, much of which is not collected or properly disposed of thereby causing environmental and health hazards which might have even led to the most recent cholera outbreak in the city.
- Transportation: Lagos is notorious for its unrelenting traffic jams and inadequate public transportation systems.
- Electricity: Nigeria as a whole is plagued by inadequate power supply which affects both residential and commercial sectors.
- Flooding: Lagos is known for its poor drainage systems and inadequate refuse disposal systems that frequently lead to flooding, one as recent as the 3rd of July 2024.
Urbanisation in Lagos’ Context
Waste Management: The recent cholera outbreak could have been avoided if adequate waste management systems had been initially put in place. Urbanisation could have helped avoid the outbreak in the first place in various ways such as:
- Implementation of a mobile-based recycling incentive program, where participants can be rewarded for proper waste sorting and cycling. IoT can be used to enable bins to monitor waste levels, optimise collection routes, and in turn, reduce the environmental impact of waste disposal.
- With Nigeria being a booming technology hub in the continent, software developers can create user-friendly apps that connect the residents with waste collectors. This can help in ensuring timely waste collection, reducing illegal dumping, and overall improvement of collection efficiency.
Water Management: With Nigeria being the way it is, advanced smart water systems would resemble a situation where one implores the use of a hammer to kill an ant, instead, practical technological solutions can be applied to make a substantial impact by implementing:
- A Low-cost, mobile-based water quality testing kit can be implemented to allow residents to check water safety and report issues to the water governing bodies. This can help to identify and address water issues promptly.
- SMS-based reporting can be developed for reporting water shortages or contamination issues. This can improve quick responses to water-related problems.
- A digital map of public water resources inclusive of information regarding water quality and availability should be available via mobile apps so residents can always easily locate the nearest safe water sources.
Learning from China: Gbadebo Rhodes Vivour, a gubernatorial candidate of the Labour Party for Lagos state is also an architect in an interview talked about how Lagos state can emulate China’s sponge city concept for managing urban water systems and enhancing resistance to flooding. The concepts involve nature-based solutions like wetlands, greenways, parks, rain gardens, green roofs, and bioswales.
The key elements of the sponge cities include:
- Wetlands improve the livability of cities by purifying, storing, and regulating rainwater.
- Permeable pavements introduce water to the ground reducing surface runoff and flooding.
- Green roofs and walls absorb rainwater, reduce heat, and offer insulation to buildings.
- Underground water reserves and retention basins can be used to capture and store excess rainwater for later use.
Flooding can also be mitigated with technology by creating digital mappings of flood-prone areas to aid in urban planning and emergency responses. Weather data can be utilised to create basic early-warning flooding systems. Residents can be alerted via SMS to prepare for and respond to flooding occurrences.
Implementation Challenges
It is not enough to provide solutions to problems, it is also wise and noteworthy to be aware of the hurdles that are most likely to hinder the proposed solutions. As such, Lagos if not Nigeria as a whole faces several challenges in implementing the technological solutions. They are as follows:
- As of the 6th of July 2024, the national grid in charge of the nationwide supply of electrical energy collapsed for the 4th time in the year. Such occurrence poses a challenge to the proposed technical solutions seeing as they are dependent on basic infrastructure like constant electricity and reliable internet connectivity.
- With the fact that not all residents in Lagos are of the digital age, the skills to navigate the proposed digital solutions would be lacking.
- Lagos and the Nigerian government as a whole have a peculiar history with the mismanagement of public funds ergo securing funding for technological initiatives would be challenging, to say the least.
- The absence of existing and emerging regulatory bodies may hinder the implementation of the solutions.
Strategies to Tackle the Challenges
- Phased implementations should be employed. Pilot projects should be started on smaller scales in a controlled environment. This helps in testing and refinements of the solutions.
- The government should collaborate with the private sector to fund and implement technological solutions.
- Community involvement is paramount. Seeing that the solutions are there in the first place to meet local needs, local communities should be involved in the design and implementation process.
- Digital literacy projects should be invested in to ensure the widespread adoption of technological solutions.
- Government agencies should develop supporting and preservation policies & regulations for emerging technological solutions.
Urbanisation can mean different things in different contexts. In Japan, urbanisation is the development of Tokyo eSG, a carbon-neutral city resilient to climate and health crises while in Lagos, it simply means technological solutions that can address fundamental needs like access to clean water and the eradication of environmental challenges such as flooding, pollution, and poor waste management.
In all, using technology to improve urban life anywhere in the world requires a multifaceted approach that addresses the context’s unique challenges.
Work Cited:
Sasu, D.D., 2023. Nigeria: Lagos population 2000-2035. Statista. Available at: https://www.statista.com/statistics/1308467/population-of-lagos-nigeria/ [Accessed 9 July 2024]
