Homemaking and Home/Lessness in Displacement: Situated Practices of Urban Emplacement in Lagos

Abstract

Lagos, Africa’s most populous metropolis, has long undergone turbulent transformations driven by both economic migrants and internally displaced persons (IDPs) whose rapid inflow to the city has deepened housing shortages and heightened inequality, particularly for low-income groups. This article examines how forced and itinerant migrants from northern Nigeria negotiate home/lessness across public and semi-public spaces of Lagos. Drawing on two qualitative datasets and four case studies, we trace migrants’ trajectories and analyse their homemaking practices through the lens of spatial refiguration. We conceptualise intersections as the cross-points where (a) migration trajectories, (b) infrastructural affordances and (c) networks of belonging converge to shape situated practices of home/lessness. The analysis develops a typology of homemaking under precarity, showing how migrants create provisional forms of presence through infrastructural niches, religious communities and solidarity networks. In doing so, this article shifts focus from the absence of housing to the agentful practices of homemaking that reconfigure urban space. We argue that an intersectional refiguration perspective clarifies how homelessness and homemaking are co-produced, offering new insights into migration and urban transformation in the Global South.