Nigeria should design urban housing ‘holistically’

Efforts to provide housing for the urban poor in Lagos need to “contextualise” what people want, and to discover their specific needs before developing solutions, says Omoh Odunbaku, a Nigerian human settlements officer at UN-Habitat.

Odunbaku did her award-winning master’s research on the social and economic determinants of housing in Lagos. In this filmed interview, she argues that housing should be approached “holistically” rather than as a single component of urban planning — and so it should involve all relevant sectors including government, academics and, crucially, the finance sector. She also calls for architects to design housing for the local environment rather than adopting European or US models that may be unsuitable for the humid conditions in Nigeria’s capital.