Towards City Resilience: The Influence of Socio-cultural and Economic Features of Housing on Population Growth in Public Residential Estates

Although there is increasing knowledge about the role housing plays in promoting resilience in cities, studies on the socio-cultural and economic features of housing that enhance the capacity of public housing schemes to absorb the impacts of rapid population growth in cities of developing countries are limited. This article, therefore, explored the features of selected public residential estates in Abuja, Nigeria with the aim of revealing the socio-cultural and economic features of housing responsible for attracting and sustaining increasing numbers of residents in public housing environments. A questionnaire survey was conducted among 345 residents in seven selected public housing schemes in the study area. In total, 13 variables were investigated and the data were analyzed using categorical regression analysis at 95% confidence level (i.e. p ≤ 0.05). With R2 = 0.716, the regression model revealed that the availability of economic activities, mixture of ethnic groups and quality of services made the most significant contributions to explaining the increasing number of residents in the public housing estates sampled. The findings are vital to inform housing designers and developers about the need to give adequate consideration to these features of housing in order to improve the capacity of such schemes to absorb the impacts of rapid population growth and thus contribute to enhancing city resilience in the face of growing negative impacts of rapid urbanization in developing countries.