The Challenges of Rapid Urban Growth in Lagos

⚠️ The Challenges of Rapid Urban Growth in Lagos

For all its energy and opportunity, Lagos also faces challenges that are the direct consequence of growth outstripping the infrastructure available to support it. These are not inevitable features of cities — they are the result of a city growing faster than any planned system can accommodate.

Housing and Informal Settlements

Between 60 and 70% of Lagos's population live in informal housing — dwellings built without planning permission, often from salvaged materials, without mains water or sewerage connections, and at densities far beyond what any housing code would permit. Ajegunle, Mushin, Agege, Bariga — these are neighbourhoods where entire families of six share a single room, where the narrow alleyways between dwellings never receive direct sunlight, and where landlords charge for every bucket of water because there is no running tap.

The most famous of Lagos's informal settlements — and one of the most remarkable communities anywhere on Earth — is Makoko. Built on stilts over Lagos Lagoon, Makoko is a floating community of approximately 100,000 people living in wooden houses on stakes driven into the lagoon floor. Residents fish, trade, cook, sleep, and raise children on the water. There is no mains water, no sewerage system, no formal electricity grid. Children paddle canoes to school. Waste goes directly into the water. Cholera and other waterborne diseases are a constant risk.

In 2012, Lagos State Government issued an eviction notice to Makoko, demolishing houses and displacing approximately 30,000 people in a single operation, describing the settlement as a health hazard and an obstacle to development. The evictions were immediately controversial — 30,000 people lost their homes in days, with no alternative housing provided. Makoko has since partially rebuilt. The episode illustrates the brutal tension at the heart of urban development in Lagos: the government wants a modern city; a third of its residents live in informal settlements.

Traffic and Transport

Lagos is, by most international measures, one of the worst cities in the world for traffic congestion. The Oshodi area near the central market creates gridlock that can trap vehicles for four to six hours. Workers in Lagos commonly spend three to five hours per day commuting — time that cannot be spent earning, caring for children, or sleeping. The economic cost of Lagos's congestion is estimated at over $1 billion per year in lost productivity.

The root cause is straightforward: a city that grew from 300,000 to 21 million people in 70 years, in a physical geography of narrow peninsulas and lagoon islands that makes road building difficult, and where most of that growth happened in informal settlements with no road planning. The result is a city whose road network cannot cope with its population at almost any hour of the day.

Sanitation and Water

Approximately 40% of Lagos residents lack access to safe, piped drinking water. Most of the city's informal settlements have no sewerage connection — waste goes into open drains, which empty into the lagoon and ocean. The Lagos Lagoon, which should be one of the city's great assets, receives enormous quantities of untreated sewage and industrial waste, making it one of the most polluted bodies of water in West Africa.

Cholera outbreaks occur periodically, particularly during heavy rains when flood water mixes with open drains and overwhelms the informal drainage systems. In 2021, a cholera outbreak in Lagos killed over 100 people and infected thousands. Waterborne disease disproportionately affects the poorest residents living in the most densely crowded informal settlements.

Flooding and Environmental Hazards

Lagos is one of the world's most flood-vulnerable cities. Its physical geography — low-lying, on a lagoon, adjacent to the Atlantic Ocean — makes it inherently exposed to both coastal flooding and river flooding. Victoria Island, the wealthiest part of the city, floods regularly during intense rainfall because its storm drainage system cannot handle extreme rainfall events. Climate change is making this worse: sea levels are rising, rainfall is becoming more intense, and the Atlantic coastline is eroding.

In informal settlements built on low-lying land, flooding is annual and devastating. Homes are inundated, possessions destroyed, diseases spread through flood water. Residents of Makoko experience this as a routine feature of their lives, not an exceptional disaster.

Lagos is also grappling with e-waste — electronic waste from discarded computers, phones and electrical equipment shipped illegally from Europe and North America. Agbogbloshie in Ghana is the most famous example in West Africa, but Lagos also receives significant volumes of e-waste, which is often processed by hand-burning in informal areas, releasing toxic heavy metals into the soil and air.

Inequality and Crime

Perhaps the sharpest challenge in Lagos is the coexistence of extreme wealth and extreme poverty within the same city. Victoria Island and Ikoyi — the wealthy islands at the south of the city — contain gated housing estates, luxury shopping malls, five-star hotels, and restaurants where a meal costs more than a week's wages for most Lagosians. Drive 15 minutes north across Third Mainland Bridge and you are in Mushin or Ajegunle, where open sewers run alongside unpaved alleys and a family of six shares a room the size of a large bathroom.

This inequality generates social tension. Lagos has high rates of petty crime, and armed robbery — known locally as "one-chance" schemes where taxi passengers are robbed — is a well-known risk. The wealthy response is to retreat behind ever-higher walls and hire private security, which further deepens the social distance between communities.