The Politics of Urban Expansion: Evidence from Lagos

• In Event: Land and Politics in Africa

Abstract

Although Africa is still predominantly rural, populations are quickly becoming concentrated in urban areas. Of the 30 fastest-growing cities in the world, based on population projections, 21 are in Africa. These and other cities are rapidly sprawling into previously rural areas, bringing sudden demographic and economic changes. With these changes, sites on the urban periphery become important, yet rarely studied, arenas of negotiation and contestation over land control and use. However, even as demand for land increases, new developments on the land -- including housing and infrastructure -- do not get built-up uniformly. What contributes to this uneven development and spatial inequality within peri-urban and urban areas?

In this paper, I explore the role of customary landowners -- families and communities who have claims to land ownership based on indigenous settlement -- in shaping patterns of urban physical development. With urbanization comes increasing land values and scarcity, and land becomes more commodified. At the same time, access to this important economic resource and decisions about how to distribute it are often governed by appeals to history and tradition. I argue that in contexts where the state is weak and unable to implement top-down planning schemes, the changing economic incentives of landowners and their interaction with business elites play an important role in shaping land use patterns. While we might expect that land under customary control would be slower to develop than state-owned land, I hypothesize that under certain conditions the opposite is true -- that custodians of customary land attract and enable particular types of new development. I explore the possibility that customary land becomes a site of largely middle-class housing estates, as customary owners enter into agreements with private developers. Customary landowners strategically respond to the new opportunities brought by urbanization by bargaining with estate developers who can offer them economic payoffs. I also explore which characteristics of landowners predict different strategies of managing land. I use data from Lagos, Nigeria, to analyze the consequences of these land market decisions for access to housing, infrastructure, and public services. I combine novel data on state allocations of land to indigenous claimants with satellite-based data of built-up areas, as well as geocoded data on public infrastructure. I also explore mechanisms using interviews with customary landowners and other stakeholders.

Author

• Nicole E. Wilson, Massachusetts Institute of Technology