Research Collection Doctoral Thesis PLOTTING the prevalent but undertheorised residential areas of Lagos. Conceptualising a process of urbanisation through grounded theory and comparison Author(s): Sawyer, Lindsay Publication Date: 2016 Permanent Link: https://doi.org/10.3929/ethz-a-010898517 Rights / License: In Copyright - Non-Commercial Use Permitted This page was generated automatically upon download from the ETH Zurich Research Collection. For more information please consult the Terms of use. ETH Library LOTTING THE PREVALENT BUT UNDERTHEORISED RESIDENTIAL AREAS OF LAGOS. P ONCEPTUALISING A PROCESS OF URBANISATION THROUGH C GROUNDED THEORY AND COMPARISON A thesis submitted to attain the degree of DOCTOR OF SCIENCES of ETH ZURICH (Dr. sc. ETH Zurich) LINDSAY SAWYER 2016 DISS. ETH NO. 23932 PLOTTING the prevalent but undertheorised residential areas of Lagos. Conceptualising a process of urbanisation through grounded theory and comparison A thesis submitted to attain the degree of DOCTOR OF SCIENCES of ETH ZURICH (Dr. sc. ETH Zurich) presented by LINDSAY SAWYER MSc., University of Edinburgh born on 14.06.1985 citizen of United Kingdom accepted on the recommendation of Christian Schmid, AbdouMaliq Simone and Hubert Klumpner 2016 Plotting Lagos ii Plotting Lagos ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I owe a great debt of gratitude to so many people who have helped and supported me in the past 5 years towards the production of this thesis. Without each of you the process would have been so much harder, less pleasurable and the thesis would not be the same. Without any of you, I simply could not have done it. Please consider these acknowledgements a heartfelt thank you for your contribution, in whatever form it took, I value you deeply. The following is in no particular order, apart from roughly chronological. Thank you to my family and incredible group of friends: to my parents Jan and Tom for their constant love and support, and my aunty Ann – sorry for all the worry I’ve caused! To my brothers Ant and Richard for always checking up on me. To Heather, Ellie and Charlie always; and Kristie, Sarah Ross, Naomi Turner, Kathryn, Ak, and Rebecca to name just a very few, and a special thank you to Sam Boyle who started my journey to Lagos with me. In Cape Town, thank you especially to the generosity of Sam Reinders, Grazia and Gcobani. And of course to Raz who has made some of the hardest few months also the best, with so much love – thank you. I am very lucky to have had such wonderful colleagues throughout the research process. Firstly, thank you to Christian Schmid for conceiving of and then including me in such an important project, and for your leadership through it. I greatly value the comparative project for allowing me to work in such a way with Christian, Naomi Hanakata, Pascal Kallenberger, Ozan Karaman, Anne Kockelkorn, Monika Streule, Rob Sullivan and Tammy Wong. Monika’s passion and integrity and Tammy’s passion and work ethic have been especially important influences. And a special thank you to Naomi whose true creativity in everything she does is a wonder and an inspiration. I continue to learn so much from you all! Thank you to the wider team at ETH: Caroline Ting, Rahel Nüssli, Tobias Kugler. Also to Philip Rekacewicz and Roger Conscience for collaborating to produce the configuration map of Lagos. And of course to my supervisors Hubert Klumpner and AbdouMaliq Simone, whose work, advice and encouragement I greatly appreciate. I am very grateful to the Future Cities Laboratory in Singapore for providing the opportunity and fund- ing for this research. Also for the fantastic facilities made available to us. A particular thank you to Ste- phen Cairns for starting me on the path to Lagos way back in Edinburgh, and for your guidance through the research. Also to Jane M. Jacobs for her invaluable advice and encouragement. I was lucky enough to share the experience of living and working in Singapore with an incredible group of friends and col- leagues: Adrianne, Alice, Artem, Ben, Felix, Gideon, Lin, Marcel, Marta, and Pieter to name just a few. My research in Lagos was enabled by so many people: friends, colleagues and contacts, and I am grateful to each one: Kunlé Adeyemi; Mr Agbodemu; David Aradeon; Bogobiri for the internet!; Carlos Cazalis; Megan Chapman; Teju Cole; Ore Disu; Caroline Duffield; Dr Femi; John Godwin and Gillian Hopwood; Shelby Grossman; Helios Towers; Jaco; Erica Licht; Andrew Maki; Felix Morka; Alexis Okeowo; Giles Omezi; Papa Omotayo; Tosin Oshinowo; Marc-André Schmachtel and the Goethe Institute Lagos; AAF people: Joseph, Evelyn, Azu, Medina and of course Wunika; Malaika Toyo; and Olamide Udoma. My iv apologies to anyone I’ve missed! A special thank you to Henry Nwankwo who opened up Lagos for me; and to my esteemed contacts at the University of Lagos, particularly in the Department of Urban and Regional Planning: Franca Attoh, Samuel Dekolo, Taibat Lawanson, Immaculata Ifunanya Nwokoro, Leke Oduwaye; Omoh Yadua; and a special thanks to the students and their invaluable assistance: Wole, John, Alexis, Babade, Eni, Iskil, Morayo, Stephen. Also Adesoji Jiboye and Adetokunbo Ilesanmi at Oba- femi Awolowo University, and Babatunde Agbola at University of Ibadan. Finally thank you to the kind assistance of Maximus Oguwuoke and Ayodele Adediran at Lagos State Government. Finally, thank you to the African Centre for Cities at the University of Cape Town for hosting me for the writing up period and providing such an inspirational set of colleagues. Special thanks to: Liza Cirolia; Henrik Ernstson; Ntombini Marrengane; Laura Nkula-Wenz; Edgar Pieterse; Sue Parnell; Suraya Scheba and Maryam Wagley. v Plotting Lagos ABSTRACT | EN This thesis attempts to contribute to a renewed understanding of the urbanisation of Lagos and to arrive at a more satisfying representation of its complexities and specificities. The thesis considers the preva- lent residential areas of Lagos as a coherent spatial configuration and works to proposing conceptualise Plotting as a heuristic theoretical category to account for them. Lagos still represents a significant chal- lenge to current urban theory and methods. The gaps in knowledge about Lagos speak to the inadequate conceptual and methodological tools there have so far been to approach and analyse it as a ‘city of the global South’. This thesis forms part of the recent impetus in urban studies for new ways of producing knowledge about the urban with a revalorised focus on Southern urbanism and comparison. As such, this thesis works to formulate Plotting as a new conceptual tool to account for the production of the prevalent spatial configuration of Lagos that has not been adequately analysed by taking a grounded theory approach within a wider comparative framework. This configuration consists of extensive resi- dential areas where the majority of people in Lagos live, mostly in the ubiquitous form of rental housing called Face-Me-I-Face You. Plotting is conceptualised to account for the piecemeal development and intensification of these areas through the contradictions, contestations and multiple systems of territo- rial authority of the dual land regime in Lagos. This research is part of the Planetary Urbanisation in Comparative Perspective project that undertook a theoretically and methodologically rigorous compari- son of eight urban regions based the grounded empirical work of eight colleagues and myself: Tokyo, Hong Kong-Shenzhen-Dongguan, Kolkata, Istanbul, Lagos, Paris, Mexico City and Los Angeles. This thesis adopts a grounded theory methodology, collecting and analysing qualitative data in order to build new theoretical categories through iterative rounds of data collection and analysis including comparative analysis. Data was primarily collected through intensive periods of fieldwork between 2012-2014. Desk- based methods were also used but there was an emphasis on fieldwork to address the lack of available data in certain areas and to allow concepts to emerge from the ground. The first two chapters of the thesis are a product of the pattern and pathway analysis conducted as part of the comparative project. Read together, they provide a comprehensive representation of Lagos, further represented through a configuration map. The Pattern chapter identifies and analyses the spatial configurations of Lagos: areas dominated by a specific process of urbanisation and what this process is. The extensive residential areas of Lagos that are the focus of this research were identified as a discrete spatial configuration in this way. The Periodization of Lagos works to show the formation of the dynam- ics through which the present day patterns emerged, emphasising the emergence and reproduction of the dual territorial regulation and dual land regime and their fundamentally unequal spatial and power dynamics. The thesis then looks at the current tools available to analyse the extensive residential areas and finds them to be ‘missed’ either by rich empirical work that remains detached from urban theory, or by one-dimensional analyses both of which stop short of considering these areas as part of a discrete multidimensional process or spatial configuration. Further, the broader literature on informal rental housing and land delivery in unplanned areas of urban Africa shows these areas of Lagos to form part of a blindspot in literature and policy towards prevalent but tolerated majority conditions. The main vi body of the thesis, chapters 6 and 7, then do the work of conceptualising Plotting as the process of urbanisation that produced the spatial configuration identified through the pattern analysis. Together they form a multidimensional analysis that attempts to account for its complexities and specificities. Chapter 6 looks at the (dual) regulatory dimension and how it affects everyday life, introducing the no- tion of ‘private/ network gain over public good’ to examine the power dynamics and structures of social organisation that developed reciprocally with Plotting. The chapter offers a working definition of Plot- ting derived through the research and a comparative analysis of Lagos, Istanbul, Kolkata and Shenzhen.