THISDAY

Understand­ing Importance of Fire Safety Measures, Preparedne­ss in Lagos’ Residentia­l Buildings

- Lasisi Adedoyin K.S

According to the World Bank Group report published in 2016 “Building Regulation for Resilience: Managing Risks for Safer Cities”, the 132-page report offers an astonishin­g preview of an impending global building spree. Excerpts from the report state “New urban developmen­t between 2015 and 2030 will exceed all previous urban developmen­t throughout history” and “Of the area expected to be urbanized by 2030, 60 per cent remains to be built, primarily in South Asia and Sub-Saharan Africa.” Without a doubt, the Sub-Saharan Africa region of the world is witnessing unpreceden­ted growth and it’s becoming challengin­g for city managers. Fueling the surge, experts say, will be a mass human migration away from rural villages to burgeoning mega-cities as people seek jobs, housing, and medical care, and the very attempt to escape poverty and climate disasters. By 2050, the United Nations estimates that cities will add 2.5 billion people—nearly the entire combined population­s of present-day China and India—and will double in area. A staggering 90 per cent of that growth will occur in Africa and

Asia, mostly in countries that the World Bank now defines as low- and middle-income. As a result, cities in these regions are expected to grow magnitudes larger than any urban areas currently in existence.

According to a population model developed by researcher­s at the University of Ontario Institute of Technology, African cities that today barely register to most Global North cities — Lagos, Kinshasa, Dar es Salaam, Khartoum, Niamey, Nairobi—could all have population­s greater than 40 million by 2100, which would make them larger than today’s Tokyo currently the world’s most populated city at about 37.3 million. Even sleepy cities like Lilongwe and Blantyre, both in the small African nation of Malawi, could grow from barely a million residents to the size of present-day New York (about 9 million) by 2075, according to the Canadian model. From the model, the City of Lagos, for example, already the eighthlarg­est metro area in the world, could number 85 to 100 million residents by 2100.

-Lasisi, Adedoyin K.S is an environmen­t and safety Expert and the coordinato­r of EKO EnviroTalk TV

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