This thesis attempts to contribute to a renewed understanding of the urbanisation of Lagos and to arrive at a more satisfying representation of its complexities and specificities. The thesis considers the prevalent residential areas of Lagos as a coherent spatial configuration and works to proposing conceptualise Plotting as a heuristic theoretical category to account for them. Lagos still represents a significant challenge to current urban theory and methods. The gaps in knowledge about Lagos speak to the inadequate conceptual and methodological tools there have so far been to approach and analyse it as a ‘city of the global South’. This thesis forms part of the recent impetus in urban studies for new ways of producing knowledge about the urban with a revalorised focus on Southern urbanism and comparison. As such, this thesis works to formulate Plotting as a new conceptual tool to account for the production of the prevalent spatial configuration of Lagos that has not been adequately analysed by taking a grounded theory approach within a wider comparative framework. This configuration consists of extensive residential areas where the majority of people in Lagos live, mostly in the ubiquitous form of rental housing called Face-Me-I-Face You. Plotting is conceptualised to account for the piecemeal development and intensification of these areas through the contradictions, contestations and multiple systems of territorial authority of the dual land regime in Lagos. This research is part of the Planetary Urbanisation in Comparative Perspective project that undertook a theoretically and methodologically rigorous comparison of eight urban regions based the grounded empirical work of eight colleagues and myself: Tokyo, Hong Kong-Shenzhen-Dongguan, Kolkata, Istanbul, Lagos, Paris, Mexico City and Los Angeles. This thesis adopts a grounded theory methodology, collecting and analysing qualitative data in order to build new theoretical categories through iterative rounds of data collection and analysis including comparative analysis. Data was primarily collected through intensive periods of fieldwork between 2012-2014. Deskbased methods were also used but there was an emphasis on fieldwork to address the lack of available data in certain areas and to allow concepts to emerge from the ground.

The first two chapters of the thesis are a product of the pattern and pathway analysis conducted as part of the comparative project. Read together, they provide a comprehensive representation of Lagos, further represented through a configuration map. The Pattern chapter identifies and analyses the spatial configurations of Lagos: areas dominated by a specific process of urbanisation and what this process is. The extensive residential areas of Lagos that are the focus of this research were identified as a discrete spatial configuration in this way. The Periodization of Lagos works to show the formation of the dynamics through which the present day patterns emerged, emphasising the emergence and reproduction of the dual territorial regulation and dual land regime and their fundamentally unequal spatial and power dynamics. The thesis then looks at the current tools available to analyse the extensive residential areas and finds them to be ‘missed’either by rich empirical work that remains detached from urban theory, or by one-dimensional analyses both of which stop short of considering these areas as part of a discrete multidimensional process or spatial configuration. Further, the broader literature on informal rental housing and land delivery in unplanned areas of urban Africa shows these areas of Lagos to form part of a blindspot in literature and policy towards …