Radical Housing: A Critical Theory of Self-Organised Informal Settlement as Architectural Production in Lagos

Informal settlements in Lagos have been systematically theorised as planning failures, architectural deficits, or humanitarian emergencies, and rarely as forms of architectural production that deserve analysis on their own design and spatial terms. This dissertation develops a critical theory of self-organised informal settlement as a distinctive mode of architectural production, challenging deficit framings through a rigorous theoretical and empirical analysis of informal building practice in three Lagos informal settlements across contrasting ecological and socioeconomic contexts. The theoretical framework develops the concept of radical housing, defined as housing production outside the institutions and disciplines of formal architectural practice that nonetheless embodies architectural intelligence, social design capability, and spatial agency. Three original theoretical contributions are made: a theory of distributed design authorship that accounts for the collective spatial intelligence embedded in informal settlement morphology without recourse to romantic primitivism; a temporal materiality theory that theorises incremental informal construction as an architectural design medium distinct from but comparable to conventional project-based design; and a socio-spatial capital theory that reconceptualises informal settlement density and proximity as intentional social design rather than the overcrowding of inadequate provision. Empirical evidence is generated through extended ethnographic fieldwork in Makoko, Agege Market settlement, and Ajegunle, combining building archaeology, design process interviews with informal builders and residents, and spatial behaviour observation. The dissertation argues that radical housing production contains design knowledge that formal architecture must engage with rather than overcome. Keywords: informal settlement, Lagos, critical housing theory, self-organised urbanism, architectural production.