Theoretical and Empirical Contributions to Understanding Urban Sprawl Governance in Rapidly Urbanising West African Cities: Evidence from Kano, Lagos, and Port Harcourt

Urban sprawl governance in West African megacities operates under fundamental theoretical tensions between growth management imperatives and political economy constraints that existing urban management frameworks, developed predominantly in North American and European contexts, inadequately conceptualise. This dissertation makes original theoretical and empirical contributions to understanding urban sprawl governance in rapidly urbanising West African cities through a comparative geospatial analysis of Kano, Lagos, and Port Harcourt. A theoretical synthesis drawing on Political Ecology, Urban Metabolism, and Polycentric Governance Theory is developed to construct an African Urban Sprawl Governance Framework that foregrounds informality, land tenure duality, and state capacity heterogeneity as central explanatory variables. The empirical investigation applies long-term multispectral time-series analysis spanning 1990 to 2024 to quantify sprawl metrics at one-kilometre resolution for all three cities. Geographically weighted regression models estimate the spatially heterogeneous relationships between sprawl intensity, planning regulation coverage, land value, infrastructure provision, and governance quality across urban-rural gradients. A mixed-methods comparative governance analysis integrates semi-structured interviews with forty-eight planning officials, land administrators, and urban civil society representatives across the three cities. Original contributions include the West African Urban Sprawl Governance Typology, characterising three distinct governance failure modes, and a spatial early warning indicator framework for identifying pre-sprawl development pressure zones. The dissertation provides transferable analytical tools for urban planning agencies across West African rapidly urbanising cities. Keywords: urban sprawl, governance, geospatial analysis, West Africa, political ecology.