AN ASSESSMENT OF POVERTY AND URBAN LIVELIHOOD IMPACT ON PHYSICAL DEVELOPMENT

Background to Study

 Urban poverty and livelihoods has been the major concern of professionals in the built environment such as urban economists and urban planners for many decades, which they considered as an impediments to the physical development of most cities in the developing countries like Nigeria.

 However, majority of these professionals have common views in conceptualizing, measuring and establishing the key indicators for contemporary poverty issues such as the use of household assets and multiple deprivations of poor-housing status, basic civil needs and general livelihood opportunities for measuring urban poverty and its associated deplorable livelihood conditions. There is no doubt about the fact that, economic development and urbanization have close relationship, but this trend, has for the past three decades taken opposite dimension of what is now popularly known as “urbanization of poverty” in most of the cities and towns in developing countries. This is as a result of relatively inadequate or poor development of informal sector of urban economy as well as skill upgrading so as to enhance the employment opportunities for the low income population. One of the important tasks in the improvement of cities is the elimination of urban poverty in all ramifications that is whether absolute or relative poverty and deprivations of lower class.

 Urban poverty is multi-dimensional. A drafted note by India government on “National Urban Livelihoods Mission” (NULM 2013/2014), categorized poverty dimensions into three conditions as:

(i) residential vulnerability (access to land, shelter, basic services, etc.)

(ii) social vulnerability (deprivations related to factors like gender, age and social stratification, lack of social protection, inadequate voice and participation in governance structures, etc.) and

(iii) occupational vulnerability (precarious livelihoods, dependence on informal sector for employment and earnings, lack of job security, poor working conditions, etc.).

Urban poverty is fundamentally responsible for slums formation and informal settlements which always stem from population explosion in the cities and fuel by incessant rural-urban migration of people in search of livelihoods opportunities due to the relatively under-development between rural and urban areas. Majority of these migrants’ skills do not fit into the urban economic systems as expressed by ‘Onibokun’ (1987) that, rural development to be faced with the paradox that the production oriented rural economy relies heavily on non-productive people (mainly the aged and very young) who are ill-equipped with the outdated tools, technical information, scientific and cultural training and whose traditional roles and access to resource pose problems for their effective incorporation into modern economic systems, whereas the consumption oriented urban economy is flood with people many of who are either unemployed or unemployable or marginally employed or As a result of this mass exodus, the rural areas have become qualitatively depopulated and are progressively less attractive for social and economic investment while the urban areas are becoming physically congested, unhealthy and generally uneconomic to maintain (urban slums and informal settlements).

Scope of the Study

The scope of this study is to examine the spatial dimension of urban poverty in Nyinkangbe area.

This focused on the substandard or haphazard physical development which often lead to the emergent of informal settlements that is occupied mostly by low income population.

The study equally examined the livelihoods pattern of the poverty bracket; their sources of income in relation to their standard of living and the surrounding environment. underemployed in the urban centres where they choose to live.