Towards an Indigenous Theory of Urban Informality in Nigerian Cities: Original Contributions from Lagos, Kano, and Port Harcourt

Urban informality in Nigerian cities, encompassing informal housing, informal economies, and informal governance, is predominantly theorised through frameworks developed from Latin American or South Asian urban research that miss the distinctive political, cultural, and institutional dynamics of West African urbanism. This doctoral study makes an original theoretical contribution to urban informality sociology by developing an indigenous framework grounded in five years of ethnographic and institutional research across Lagos, Kano, and Port Harcourt. The study combines fourteen months of participant observation in informal settlement communities in each city, analysis of sixty years of urban planning records and policies, 102 life history interviews with residents, and social movement analysis of informal community organisations. The original framework, termed Nigerian Urban Informality Assemblage Theory, proposes that Nigerian urban informality is not a deficiency of urban development but a structurally produced political economy in which state actors, market forces, ethnic institutions, and community organisations produce and reproduce the informal as a governance arena through which state-society relations are continuously negotiated. Four original theoretical contributions emerge: a typology of Nigerian informality governance modes distinct from existing literature; a theory of ethnic urban informality in which ethnicity operates as the primary organising principle of informal resource access; an analysis of the gendered urban contract through which women's domestic informality subsidises the male-dominated informal market economy; and a historicisation of informality as a post-colonial institutional inheritance. The doctoral framework advances African urban sociology through rigorous theoretical innovation grounded in comparative multi-city Nigerian evidence. Keywords: urban informality, Nigerian cities, indigenous theory, informal economy, post-colonial urbanism.