2026 Theses Master's

The Water Never Forgets: Embodied Epistemologies of Navigation and Remembrance for Entropic Urban Futures in Lagos, Nigeria

Oluyadi, Ayomikun

We cannot remain wary only of British, Portuguese, or other imperial/colonial powers while we (the people, governments and institutions) also dehumanize, extort, and destroy each other.

My thesis evaluates how embodied knowledge and cultural traditions of navigation and memory serve as alternative frameworks for resilience in Lagos, Nigeria. In recent years, the city has faced intensifying threats from fractured infrastructure, overcrowding, climate change, and sea-level rise. Yearly, residents are plagued by a series of devastating floods, during which some parts of Lagos sink at an estimated rate of about 87 mm, resulting in approximately $4 billion in annual damage (“Lagos Floods - Interconnected Disaster Risks,” n.d.).

Additionally, neoliberal logics and vestiges of British colonial ideologies, in which land and water are often framed as obstacles to be flattened, filled, or concealed, still permeate today’s state planning, architecture, and real estate practices. As a result, urgent social and environmental interventions are treated as merely aspirational rather than as critical, non-negotiable components of urban governance.

This research adopts a contextual and descriptive approach grounded in decolonial, community-based theorization using semi-structured interviews, crowdsourcing images and videos, and archival research, to interpret oral accounts, fragmented documentation, and skewed cartography. I will compare the historical changes in water and land boundaries, as well as environmental conditions, from the pre-colonial and colonial periods, to current spatial arrangements in selected Lagos neighborhoods, such as Lekki, and in fishing communities like Makoko.

This comparison will help trace environmental transformations and the political-economic decisions that have shaped present-day challenges. After this spatial analysis, I will examine the informal, culturally grounded ways through which residents remember and navigate past disasters or moments of societal change, and how these practices inform adaptation and resilience planning strategies for current and future environmental events. Even if change is slow or uneven, one must begin somewhere. This work embodies that courageous beginning.