A Roadmap for Inclusive and Sustainable Human Settlements: A General Xray

Abstract

Human settlements are fragmentations of different groups of people being classified along the lines of gender, income, religion, ethnicity, the rich, the poor, etc. Policy and decision makers often make the mistake of excluding some sets of people, the marginalized, the less privileged and the vulnerable among others in planning and decision making. The paper provides a general overview on theoretical perspectives on the dimensions of social inclusion/exclusion and exploring the landscape of inclusiveness generally with reference to some isolated cases in Nigeria. The study specific are to understand the dimension of social inclusion and exclusion, identify the landscape of inclusion and exclusion, establish the key groups to be included and how to enhance social inclusion of all groups of people in the society that will encouraged sustainable human settlements generally. The study adopted a desktop analysis approach by the x-ray of pertinent literature together with reports from United Nations among others to give a general overview on inclusive human settlement. The dimensions of social inclusion and exclusion from literatures were found to be diverse. The landscape of inclusion and exclusion include poverty, employment and sustainable development of human settlement. The identified key groups to be considered in social inclusion are women, youths, older people and migrants. And five steps for promoting social inclusion were identified. The key recommendations include, addressing challenges posed by discriminations, ethnicity, etc, through fostering gender equality, support for the integration of migrants, employing best practices in stakeholder engagements and strengthening the relationship of stakeholders as key participants in the constant evolution of human settlements among others as provided in the literature