Towards a Theory of Urban Land Rent in Nigerian Cities: Re-Theorising the Bid-Rent Framework for Weak Institutional Contexts

This dissertation develops an original theoretical re-interpretation of the bid-rent framework of urban land rent for application in Nigerian cities, where the behavioural and institutional assumptions underlying the classical Alonso-Muth-Mills model are systematically violated by the realities of transportation, land markets, and business location in African megacity environments. The classical bid-rent model predicts orderly concentric zoning of urban activities based on their ability to pay for central accessibility, producing a monotonically declining rent gradient from the urban core. Nigerian cities exhibit radically different patterns: multiple competing centres, extreme traffic congestion that collapses the accessibility premium of the core, informal land markets that price locations through social rather than economic mechanisms, and coexistence of formal and informal land uses within the same zones. The dissertation's theoretical contribution proceeds through three stages: critical deconstruction of the classical bid-rent model's behavioural, institutional, and geographic assumptions; development of an alternative Lagos Urban Rent Theory drawing on post-colonial urban economics, network centrality models, and informal land market theory; and empirical calibration using a comprehensive commercial and residential rent dataset for 4,800 properties across Lagos Metropolitan Area, supplemented by transportation accessibility modelling. The revised framework introduces the concept of relational accessibility, which captures access mediated through social networks rather than transport cost, and the multi-nuclei rent surface, which models land rent as a function of proximity to multiple competing activity centres of different types. The framework is validated against the empirical Lagos rent data and its implications for urban planning and estate development site analysis are drawn. Keywords: urban land rent, bid-rent theory, Lagos, urban economics, informal land market.