An alternative approach to the urban residential location decision in Nigeria: The nestling idea

Urban residential location decision is of interest not only to researchers but to planners and urban policy decision makers because of the influence such household decisions have on effective and efficient use of urban facilities and its implications on the householdʹs financial budget. Researchers have often approached their study by focusing on the city centre as the pivot on which location decisions are made. The results of a recent research on household residential location decisions in Ibadan are presented in this article. Parts of the results show that there is no significant basis for according to the city centre a significant place in the residential location decision in Ibadan. Rather, the distribution of the household activity nodes appears to be a better factor of residential location decisions. Based on this finding, a household-centred approach is proposed in which the household adjusts its residential location to the distribution of the activity nodes it patronizes.