The Impact of Urbanisation on Health Security of Urban Dwellers in Nigeria

Studia Administracyjne 1(15)/2022 | ISSN (print): 2080-5209 | ISSN (online): 2353-284X www.wnus.edu.pl/sa | DOI: 10.18276/sa.2022.15-03 | s. 31–47 Temitope Sade Akintunde Department of Economics, Osun State University, Osogbo, Nigeria ORCID: 0000-0002-4713-7560 Musediq Olufemi Lawal Department of Sociology, Osun State University, Osogbo, Nigeria ORCID: 0000-0002-3667-2533 Olawale Olufemi Akinrinde Department of Political Sciences, Osun State University, Osogbo, Nigeria ORCID: 0000-0001-7350-2376 Corresponding author: The Impact of Urbanisation on Health Security of Urban Dwellers in Nigeria ABSTRACT Urban centres continue to attract people across social divides. So also is the environment, which changes with constant interactions among urban population who constantly harness environmental resources for their survival. This process comes with its attendant effects that could be either positive or negative. This process explains the rationale behind uneven population patterns among human settlements as well as the lopsided distribution of resources needed to make life worthy of living. The public utilities, health and social services continue to be largely unavailable and where they are available, they are inefficient, shoddy and collapsing. This study is therefore a novel attempt at making a modest contribution to academic discourse on urban studies. It tries to explore the impact of urbanisation on health situation and life expectancy of urban dwellers. The study made use of primary data, which was collected through telephone interviews. The participants in these interviews included scholars in urban studies, public health educators, social workers, and epidemiologists. This was complemented with data from existing literature from scholars in urban and health studies. The results from this study showed that urban environmental problems like inadequate water and sanitation, high infant mortality, lack of rubbish disposal, industrial pollution and its attendant respiratory infections and other infectious and parasitic diseases persist. This is therefore an indication of the deleterious status of socio-economic determinants of health that can hamper a healthy life expectancy. KEYWORDS urbanisation, socioeconomics, health, life expectancy, urban dwellers, migration 31 Temitope Sade Akintunde, Musediq Olufemi Lawal, Olawale Olufemi Akinrinde Introduction As cities and towns achieved better economic, political, social and cultural advances compared to rural areas, the process of urbanisation is believed to have taken place. The manifesting physical reality here is a progressive increase in the number of people living in such towns and cities. Michele et al. noted that the degree of urbanisation of a country varies to 1 the extent in which absolute changes in the urban and total national population manifest. The density of urban populations thus offered significant cost advantages for governments in the delivery of essential goods and services, and for the private sector, in the production and consumption of such items. Urbanisation had become a driving force as well as a source of development with the power to change and improve lives.2 It drives economic progress by concentrating people in cities, hence, the classification of cities as the engines of economic development and the centre of industry and commerce.3 Cities have spurred innovations in science and technology and in systems of law and government as well as facilitated the diffusion of information through interaction among diverse cultures.4 The term urbanisation has been defined in various ways by different authors. However, generally it is defined as the migration of people from rural areas to urban areas for better livelihood.5 It is also the transformation of a country from a rural agricultural based economy to an industrial-service based economy,6 it is the changes that occur in the density, size and heterogeneity of cities.7 It could also be taken as the multidimensional transformation of the rural societies into modernized societies. Urbanisation is, thus, mainly driven by inequalities between rural and urban areas in terms of technology and economic development, as everyone wants a better and improved life. Hence, people migrate to cities because of the social and economic attraction and the prestige that is associated with living in the city. In practice, to characterise a positive or negative change of the degree of urbanisation, it is necessary to analyse the absolute changes in the components of the ratio, namely urban and national (urban and rural) population. Urbanisation, as a physical transformation of cities and towns has attracted a great variety of scholarly attention over the years. From these activities, clarifications of issues associated with urbanisation were made from several perspectives as they relate to human activities. For example, urbanisation in some 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 M. Michele et al., Demographic Factors of Change in Urbanisation Processes: Dynamics of National Urban and Rural Population Determining the Degree of Urbanisation, European Union JRC Technical Reports, EUR 29861, Publications Office of the European Union, Luxembourg, 2019, doi:10.2760/127903, JRC118028. UN-Habitat, Habitat III: The New Urban Agenda, 2016, http:www.habitat3.org. I. Turok, Urbanisation and Development: Reinforcing the Foundations, (in:) The Routledge Companion to Planning in the Global South, G. Bhan, S. Srinivas, and V. Watson (eds.), Oxford 2017. M.P. Brockerhoff, An Urbanizing World, Population Bulletin, Population Reference Bureau 2000, No. 55(3), No 1-5. M.K. Kuddus and A. Rahman, Effect of Urbanization on Health and Nutrition, International Journal of Statistics and Systems 2015, No. 10(2), pp. 165-175. V. Henderson, The Urbanization Process and Economic Growth: The So-What Question, Journal of Economic Growth 2003, No. 8(1), pp. 47-71. S. Cyril, J.C. Oldroyd and A. Renzaho, Urbanization, Urbanicity and Health: A Systematic Review of the Reliability and Validity of Urbanicity Scales, BMC Public Health 2013, No. 13(513), pp. 4-11. 32 The Impact of Urbanisation on Health Security of Urban Dwellers in Nigeria instances is viewed as the proportion of the total national population living in areas classified as urban while urban growth strictly refers to the absolute number of people living in those areas.8 Till date, urbanisation still enjoys empirical patronage from different academic perspectives like demography, urban and regional planning, anthropology, sociology, history, economics, philosophy and political science across the globe. Hussain and Imitiyaz for instance claimed that urbanised societies in which majority of the people live crowded together in towns and cities represent a new and fundamental step in man’s social evolution.9 In their words, the way cities have influenced and shaped social life throughout the history have motivated scholars of urban studies to continue giving (...truncated)