Rapid urban growth across African cities often prices out the poorest: forced evictions, demolitions of informal settlements, and land decisions made without consulting residents.
In Lagos, Cape Town, and beyond, these patterns raise a fundamental question that goes beyond urban planning: Who gets to decide the future of a city, and whose knowledge counts in that decision?
That question was central to the Common City Conference in Uppsala, Sweden, where scholars, activists, and grassroots organizers gathered to discuss housing, urban justice, and the right to the city.
Among them was Kehinde Adegboyega, co-founder and executive director of the Human Rights Journalists Network Nigeria (HRJN), who presented a panel titled “Resisting Authoritarian Urbanism in Sub-Saharan Africa: Counter-Knowledge and the Housing Commons in Lagos and Cape Town.”
The session examined how communities in Nigeria and South Africa respond to forced evictions, dispossession, and unequal urban development, and how their own knowledge—often sidelined in policy debates—can be turned into a tool for accountability rather than left as raw material for outside researchers.
In an interview with Global Voices, Adegboyega discussed what brought him to Uppsala, how the exchanges there connect to the realities facing displaced communities in Lagos, and what he plans to bring back to his work documenting rights violations in Nigeria.
Housing as a Human Rights Issue
Adegboyega said one of the strongest lessons from the conference is that housing is not simply about having a physical structure over one’s head.
It is connected to dignity, security, livelihood, family life, community, participation, and the ability to belong to a city.
“When people are forcibly evicted from their homes without meaningful consultation, adequate protection, or access to remedy, the issue goes beyond property or economics,” he said.
“It raises fundamental questions about human rights and the relationship between citizens and the state.”
The right to adequate housing is recognized in international human rights law, including Article 11 of the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights, and is closely connected to other rights.
Adegboyega noted that this perspective is particularly important in contexts where urban development can prioritize investment and infrastructure projects while treating low-income communities as obstacles to development.
Connections Between Sweden and Nigeria
Although the political, economic, and urban contexts differ, Adegboyega sees similar questions emerging in Sweden and Nigeria: who has the right to the city, who gets to make decisions about urban development, and whose knowledge counts.
In Lagos, informal and low-income communities can face eviction, displacement, and redevelopment pressures. These communities are often described through statistics or development narratives, but their own experiences and knowledge are not always adequately represented in policy discussions.
“That is where the idea of counter-knowledge becomes important,” Adegboyega said. “Communities are not simply victims or beneficiaries of urban policy; they possess knowledge about their neighborhoods, histories, housing systems, and survival strategies.”
His work in Nigeria is therefore not only about documenting violations. It is also about ensuring that communities can document, narrate, and advocate for their own experiences.
Community-Generated Knowledge as a Tool
One idea from the conference that Adegboyega believes could be adapted to the Nigerian context is the use of community-generated knowledge as a tool for advocacy and policy change.
Too often, research about vulnerable communities is produced externally, while communities themselves have limited control over how their experiences are documented and represented. Approaches that involve residents directly in documentation, mapping, photography, storytelling, and evidence production offer a different model.
“This has strong potential in Nigeria,” he said. For example, journalists, researchers, human rights organizations, and affected communities could work together to create community-owned documentation of evictions, housing conditions, access to basic services, and changes in neighborhoods.
This could combine journalism, participatory research, digital tools, and legal advocacy.
The important principle, he said, is that technology and documentation should not simply be used to document communities, but to give communities greater capacity to document themselves and influence decisions affecting them.
What He Plans to Take Back
Adegboyega said he wants to take back three things from the conference: knowledge, networks, and methodology.
First, the conference expanded his understanding of housing justice as an intersectional human rights issue. Second, it created opportunities to connect Nigerian and African experiences with housing justice movements and researchers elsewhere.
Third, he wants to strengthen HRJN’s approach to documentation.
“I see an opportunity to bring housing rights more explicitly into that work,” he said.
This could include stronger documentation of forced evictions and displacement, training journalists on housing rights, supporting community-led evidence gathering, and producing stories that connect individual cases to broader questions of urban governance and inequality.
The Value of International Exchange
Adegboyega emphasized that international exchanges provide something valuable: the ability to see local problems through comparative perspectives.
A journalist covering an eviction in Lagos may initially see it as an isolated local story.
But when you engage with people working on similar issues in Cape Town, Dublin, Marseille, or elsewhere, you begin to see common patterns around land, property, displacement, urban governance, and power.
That comparative understanding can improve journalism, he said. It can help journalists ask better questions: Who benefits from redevelopment?
Who is being displaced? Were affected communities consulted?
What alternatives were considered? What legal protections exist?
Where is public money going? Whose voices are missing from the development narrative?
It can also help civil society organizations build stronger evidence for advocacy and litigation, while creating connections with organizations facing similar challenges elsewhere.
“For me, international exchange is therefore not simply about attending conferences,” Adegboyega said. “It is about bringing new methods, relationships and perspectives back into local practice.”
A Simple Message
The message Adegboyega wants to bring back to Nigeria is simple: “The people who live in our cities must have a meaningful say in how those cities are shaped.”
Development should not mean that communities have to surrender their homes, histories, livelihoods, and social networks without meaningful participation, protection, and remedy. He said we need to move beyond seeing vulnerable communities only as people who need to be protected.
“They are also knowledge holders, rights holders and active participants in shaping the future of their cities,” he said.
If community participation, documentation, and access to information are strengthened, the balance of power between communities and institutions making decisions about land and urban development could change.
For Adegboyega, that is the real value of housing justice: not simply ensuring that people have houses, but ensuring that people have dignity, security, a voice, and a meaningful place in the future of the city.
Source: Global Voices
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