A Comparative Study on the Integration of Sustainable Housing Principles to Enhance Quality of Life and Wellbeing for Elderly Individuals in Lagos Island

Abstract

Nigeria's older population is expanding while incomes, health cover and housing lag behind, and Lagos, the country's largest and most housing-stressed city, concentrates that strain. Lagos Island, the historic urban core, pairs an old and deteriorating building stock with a low-lying, flood-prone, increasingly hot environment. This integrative review asks how the typology and condition of older Lagosians' housing, read through the lens of sustainable housing principles, relate to their quality of life and well-being, and what the Lagos and wider Nigerian evidence implies for Lagos Island. Following the Whittemore and Knafl integrative framework, with search and selection reported against PRISMA 2020 and appraisal by the Mixed Methods Appraisal Tool, structured searches of PubMed, Scopus-indexed sources, African Journals Online, and Google Scholar (to 2026) yielded 30 peer-reviewed studies, nine of them set in Lagos State and one of those on Lagos Island. Findings were organised by thematic synthesis into six themes. Older adults ageing in their own homes and communities reported better quality of life and social participation than peers in institutions, though that advantage narrowed where the dwelling was crowded, hot, or unsafe. Across Lagos, housing condition, building type, and neighbourhood quality tracked well-being, while economic status was repeatedly the single strongest determinant of older Nigerians' quality of life. Thermal discomfort, falls, and the erosion of shared social space each linked housing to well-being.The review joins two Lagos literatures that rarely meet, one on older-adult well-being and one on housing quality, and recasts sustainable housing for older Lagosians as an affordable convergence of thermal, safety, social, and economic functions rather than a green upgrade, setting out a Lagos Island research agenda.