On the morning of November 28, 2025, an email arrived from Megan Chapman, co-founder of Justice and Empowerment Initiatives. The subject line was urgent: another forced eviction was underway. By the time I opened the message, demolition had already begun. More than 3,000 residents of Precious Seed Waterfront Community, known locally as Ferry in Oworonshoki, had woken to the sound of heavy machinery at the entrance. An excavator and a swamp buggy marked LASEMA—the Lagos State Emergency Management Agency—stood at the entrance, flanked by armed officers of the Lagos State Task Force and hired men carrying sticks and machetes. Community leaders and lawyers rushed forward with court injunctions, printing them out and pasting them onto walls and doors, only to be told that demolition would proceed regardless. Tear gas was fired to clear the way. Within hours, buildings were collapsing: multi-storey homes, churches, tiled floors reduced to dust.

Figure 1. Precious Seed Forced Eviction (Drone Footage), November 27, 2025. Courtesy JEI

In the video Megan shared with me, one scene has not left my mind. A widow named Rebecca sat on the balcony of the house she had shared with her late husband—a structure that was also her church. She refused to leave. Looking down at the officers, she said quietly: “You will have to demolish me inside, so I can join my husband.” She had received no notice, no marking, no arrangement for relocation, no temporary place to go.

I begin with this scene because it captures something that recurs across Lagos. What happened in Precious Seed is not an anomaly. It is part of a pattern through which certain lives are rendered temporary—not simply as precarious, but as governed as provisional.

Temporary lives are produced through governance. In Lagos, eviction operates as a form of urban policing: a means of regulating presence, mobility, and visibility within urban space. Across the Global South, urban eviction is increasingly justified through the language of climate adaptation, resilience, environmental protection, and safety. In Lagos, waterfront communities are routinely demolished in the name of flood prevention, sanitation, or megacity ambition, as part of efforts to “de-risk” the city for investors. These clearances are not simply breakdowns of governance. They are techniques of rule that convert land into speculative value by rendering certain populations removable, deniable, and exhaustible. They also function as policing practices, enforcing spatial order through removal rather than containment.

Lagos makes this dynamic unusually visible. It is an amphibious city, suspended between water and land, lagoon and Atlantic edge, solidity and erosion. The ground itself is unstable, and this instability is not only ecological but political. It has long attracted a particular kind of urban imagination. When Rem Koolhaas described Lagos as a city of the future, the claim appeared to recognize improvisation as intelligence rather than failure. Yet it also transformed lived hardship into aesthetic insight, reproducing what Stuart Hall called a spectacle of otherness: difference consumed without accountability.

That transformation is inseparable from vantage point. Lagos appears there as abstraction, as an aerial field of improvisation and disorder. Surveyed from above, it becomes legible as blueprint. What James Holston calls the blueprint utopia emerges through such abstraction: a rationalized vision of urban life detached from history, plurality, and friction. Blueprint urbanism does not arise from the city as it is lived. It requires erasure.

This logic takes material form in Eko Atlantic, the private enclave constructed on land dredged from the sea along Victoria Island. Marketed as a world-class city, it presents itself as a purified urban future built on “virgin” terrain. Yet this terrain is produced—through extraction, reclamation, and the reorganization of surrounding life. It embodies an aspiration to frictionless form, an urbanism cleansed of memory, labor, and loss. And yet the lives displaced by its emergence do not disappear. They reorganize themselves in its shadow.

In the settlements surrounding such developments, life unfolds under conditions of what Teresa Caldeira describes as the normalization of transitoriness. Structures are makeshift, investments are conditional, futures are hedged. People build knowing that what they build may not last. Action becomes recursive, contingent, constantly recalibrated in relation to forces that remain unpredictable.

At the same time, these conditions generate forms of sociality that are difficult to capture in conventional accounts of urban life. Because life is unstable, relations must be continuously renewed. Solidarities are fleeting but real. Infrastructures of care are shared and improvised. From a distance, these spaces are often described as disorderly. Up close, they reveal a dense and ongoing labor of coordination and endurance.

Temporariness, in this sense, is not incidental. Increasingly, it is justified through a moral language that presents eviction as care. Waterfront communities are cast as sites of exposure—places where life is said to exceed acceptable thresholds of safety. Yet this framing obscures a crucial inversion. The state often produces the very conditions it invokes—through dredging, infrastructural neglect, and the uneven distribution of environmental exposure. Risk becomes an alibi. The poor are recast not simply as at risk, but as the risk itself. Once this transformation occurs, their removal can be presented as safety, their disappearance as governance. In this sense, eviction appears not only as development policy but as a form of policing.

Within this framework, law does not disappear. It persists, but in altered form. On the Lagos waterfront, legality often functions less as protection than as performance. Titles exist, injunctions are issued, documents circulate—but their capacity to restrain executive action is uncertain. Residents describe this condition as “government magic,” a phrase that captures the instability of legality when documents no longer anchor reality but shift beneath it. Notices may arrive late or not at all. Court orders are frequently ignored. Enforcement is selective. What emerges is not the absence of law, but a legal order in which uncertainty itself becomes a governing technique.

This produces what Oren Yiftachel describes as the condition of displaceability: a chronic condition of living under the constant possibility of removal. Displaceability is not simply about being displaced. It is about living as if displacement is always imminent. People remain in place, but only on borrowed time. Dwelling becomes provisional, and the future contracts accordingly. Long-term planning becomes difficult. Decisions are hedged. Residents describe this with striking clarity: “It’s Otodo-Gbame today. It can be Makoko tomorrow.”

This condition is not only spatial. It is temporal, psychic, and bodily. Living under sustained threat produces what medical researchers describe as allostatic load: the cumulative wear and tear associated with chronic stress. During fieldwork, residents linked strokes, loss of vision, and other serious conditions to the shock and prolonged strain of eviction. Others exhibited involuntary responses—shaking, weeping, muscular tension—when recounting past displacements. These are not metaphors. They are somatic traces of repeated loss. Displacement is not experienced as a singular event, but as a recurring condition in which past trauma and anticipated loss converge in the present.

Makoko brings these dynamics into sharp relief. Often described as a slum, it is a dense social world built on water. Houses stand on stilts, canoes function as transport and livelihood infrastructure, and everyday life unfolds in close relation to the lagoon. Makoko is highly visible—thousands of commuters glimpse it daily from the Third Mainland Bridge—yet it remains affectively distant, frequently apprehended as nuisance rather than neighborhood. It is visible enough to offend, but not recognized enough to be protected.

Sanitation provides a stark example of how this vulnerability is produced. Long denied basic infrastructure, residents defecate into the same waters they depend on for daily life. The resulting conditions are then cited by authorities as evidence that Makoko is unfit for habitation. State neglect is reframed as resident failure. This is a form of hygienic governmentality in which abandonment becomes justification for removal. Residents are punished twice: first through the withdrawal of services, and then through the moralization of the conditions that result.

Despite repeated demolitions, Makoko persists. Residents return, rebuild, and reassemble life from what remains. What emerges is a form of presence without permanence: a refusal to disappear even in the absence of secure recognition. This persistence is not romantic. It is exhausting, and continually under threat. Yet it reveals something essential about the limits of dispossession.

In Ilaje-Otumara, even the fragile possibility of rebuilding has been curtailed. Following mass eviction, demolition crews returned not only to clear debris but to extract value from it. Zinc sheets, timber, and metal rods were removed from the rubble and resold. Ruination itself became a revenue stream. The stripping of debris eliminates one of the few resources displaced residents might use to reconstruct shelter elsewhere, or even at the site of the rubble. Dispossession extends beyond the loss of home into the afterlife of ruin.

Displaced residents often relocate to spaces that function as zones of abandonment: beneath bridges, in motor parks, inside unfinished buildings. For some, particularly those whose livelihoods depend on water, repeated displacement produces a recognition that dwelling can no longer be anchored to a fixed place. Survival becomes organized around movement. Dwelling is carried rather than settled. Stability becomes episodic and contingent rather than spatially secure.

These dynamics are not confined to informal settlements. They are embedded in a broader architecture of legal uncertainty that shapes property relations across Lagos. Fraud, locally referred to as “419,” is not simply criminal deviation but a structural feature of a system in which legality itself is unevenly distributed. Property is not binary but analogue. Ownership exists by degree and must be continually reinforced through documentation, payment, and social recognition. Even then, it remains fragile.

Residents often hold extensive documentation—titles, receipts, affidavits—yet still face demolition. As one official working with displaced communities put it, these documents do not protect you. At best, they buy time. Informal actors such as the omo onile (sons of the soil) operate within this same terrain of ambiguity, extracting payment and asserting authority in ways that blur the boundary between legality and coercion. Ambiguity is not resolved; it is governed.

Magodo Scheme II reveals how this condition extends into formally planned spaces. Despite a Supreme Court ruling affirming land rights after decades of litigation, enforcement was delayed for years. The judgment existed on paper but not in practice. This prolonged non-enforcement produced its own form of harm: suspended certainty, stalled development, and accumulated anxiety. The issue was not the absence of law, but its strategic deferral. Law lingered, and in lingering, it became a mechanism of dispossession.

Across Lagos’s waterfronts, a phrase recurs: “Sea never dry.” It is at once prayer, assertion, and refusal. It names continuity in a city that renders certain lives provisional. Residents continue to build, rebuild, and assert presence even in the absence of security. The sea, in this sense, is not only a site of threat but also a medium of endurance.

Figure 2. Apollo is one of six communities that make up Makoko. A minibus enters under a banner that captures the area’s quiet supplication: “Sea Never Dry.” That the phrase appears three times tells its own story. (Photo by author. July 10, 2023)

I return, finally, to Rebecca on her balcony. Her refusal to leave, her insistence that demolition would have to happen with her inside, distills the stakes of dwelling more forcefully than any concept can. It makes clear that dwelling is not simply a matter of property. It is a condition of being. And it raises a question that extends beyond Lagos: what becomes of justice when law itself participates in making lives temporary, and what forms of life persist despite it?

*An earlier version of this essay was presented as a public lecture in January 2026 as part of the NLS Public Lecture Series at the National Law School of India University (NLSIU), Bengaluru.

About Daniel E. Agbiboa

Daniel E. Agbiboa is the John and Ruth Hazel Associate Professor of the Social Sciences at Harvard University. He co-chairs the Urban Conversations Series at the Mahindra Humanities Center and is a Faculty Affiliate of the Bloomberg Center for Cities and the Salata Institute for Climate and Sustainability.