Understanding urban trends while adopting rural development as a strategy to achieve urban sustainability in Nigeria

Urban areas are already home to 55% of the world’s population with this figure expected to grow to 70% by 2050 which is in a span of a few years. Urbanization is seen as an essential force to the global efforts to build back better, and the World Cities Report 2020 confirms that cities remain central to the achievement of sustainable development. However, the speed of the urbanisation trends requires urgent and adequate sustainability measures in place. This is because the increasing trend without sustainability plans will create an overwhelming challenge that will override its transformative role in cities and negate the chances of it becoming advantageous to transition to sustainable development. While some scholars reveal that urban population growth is an important driving force to the rapid urban trends and urban expansion; others maintained that migration is a major driving force to global urban population growth. Importantly, it was noted that internal rural urban migration is the central cause of increasing urban trends in many developing countries. Strikingly, studies demonstrate that rural urban migrant congregate in urban areas in search of economic opportunities and a better life. It in effect shows that the increasing rural urban migration which causes increased urban trends is mostly a consequent of lack of economic opportunities and better life in the rural areas. This constitutes significant challenges in the urban centres and one of the most pressing of these challenges is identified as how to achieve urban sustainability. To achieve urban sustainability per se requires planning, management, and financing. The World Cities Report 2020 strongly affirms that adequately planned, managed, and financed cities creates economic, social, environmental values such that can vastly improve the quality of life of all. It can be argued that this planning includes making every effort not to neglect rural development as focusing on urban development alone is a costly negligence. Essentially, the rural development should gear towards providing quality of life and economic opportunities to the rural residents, without this, rural urban migration which results in unprecedented urbanisation will continue in the future. This will create more devastating challenges, making it more difficult to achieve urban sustainability. Based on this, the Department of Economic and Social Affairs of the United Nations in the 2021 World Social Report calls for action towards embarking on rural development to end the rural urban migration resulting from rural urban inequality. Moreover, sustainable rural development is considered in the SDGs as vital to the economic, social and environmental viability of nations. Accordingly, this paper focuses on understanding the trends of urbanisation while adopting rural development as an approach to achieve urban sustainability. The paper will draw from a wide range of 237 literature reviews and adopt a qualitative focus group discussions to ascertain the importance of rural development to urban sustainability.