Much of Lagos operates according to unwritten but widely understood and practiced rules. They work alongside statutory rules and regulations, in both complementary and contradictory ways. As such, the structures that underpin everyday life in Lagos form an ambivalent relationship with the state - often partially acknowledged and widely tolerated, but sometimes brought into great tension. For example, traditional title-holders, such the Oba and various chieftaincies, are officially recognised by Lagos State Government and are represented by the Ministry of Local Government and Community Affairs. Yet they are accorded little official power despite the de facto reality that customary landowners are an integral part of land and housing delivery in Lagos, constituting a neo-customary institution.
That over 70% of Lagos’s 18-21 million people live in unplanned areas, on plots of land with only customary tenure agreements, is known and tolerated but never officially acknowledged. This disparity between how Lagos works on the ground, and how it works on paper is a crucial dynamic that shapes the urbanisation of subSaharan Africa’s largest city, is often missing from accounts that subsequently miss the point, and forms the starting point for this research project.
Urban theory has struggled to accommodate such contradictions and parallels in the tenaciously binary understandings of informality and a whole host of conceptual definitions that haven’t travelled well from European and North American cities to the majority cities of the “Global South”. In this way, the everyday role of customary institutions has largely gone missing in Urban Studies, or been mischaracterised from a developmental approach as a predominantly rural phenomenon. Only recently has there started to be recognition of the need for taking the role of urban traditional authorities seriously in regards to land and urban governance. This forms part of a wider critique of southern urbanism that seeks to pay better attention to the realities of southern cities, improving understandings and addressing still wide gaps in knowledge. This research project seeks to locate the de facto urban governance configurations of Lagos, formed of customary institutions and other non-state organisations such as Residents’ Associations, in urban theory.
Analysing, identifying and writing about unwritten and unacknowledged practices poses a real methodological challenge. The initial proposal to “map” the de facto governance configurations of Lagos quickly became unrealistic; it seemed inappropriate to make explicit that which draws power and viability from being implicit. Methodologies are needed that avoid the colonial imperative to list, name and categorise, and find a way to accommodate contradictions and uncertainties. In the second year of the project I have been trying to develop an oblique approach both to research and to representation through writing. In this way, I have been finding ways to look at the impacts and effects of real urban governance, what is enabled through being unspoken, rather than at the institutions and organisations themselves.
I have also been taking seriously chatter, rumours, anecdotes, hearsay and stories about how power, politics, land and authority operate in Lagos. So far I have been finding, in interviews, conversations, written work and online forums, remarkable but still intangible consistencies and some great lines and stories, told with humour, anger and creativity. I am currently exploring different forms of writing that can draw deeply on literature, theory and situated research but that go beyond (or stop short) of an authoritative-academic style. This approach was going to have been put into practice over three to four months of planned fieldwork in 2020, which has of course been disrupted by the coronavirus pandemic. The current crisis has therefore opened up a whole new set of methodological challenges and anxieties, but also opportunities for reflection on the ethics of southern urbanism research by white western researchers, and the possibilities of exploring rich secondary sources.