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Paper short abstract

Children in low-income Lagos settlements face frequent displacement from evictions, demolitions and floods. Using child-centred methods, this study shows how they interpret disrupted spaces, adapt play and assert spatial agency often overlooked in mainstream research.

Paper long abstract

Children living in low-income urban settlements in Lagos experience recurrent, localised forms of displacement arising from evictions, demolitions, flooding and fires. While rarely recognised within dominant humanitarian or crisis frameworks, these disruptions reshape the spatial, social and material conditions of children’s everyday lives. This paper examines how children interpret and respond to such changes, and how participatory, child-centred research methods reveal forms of spatial knowledge and grassroots agency overlooked in mainstream urban research and development practice.

Drawing on qualitative methods including group interviews, child-led photo walks, play diaries, life mapping and play mapping, the study explores how children document, navigate and rework their neighbourhood environments. Attention is paid to constructed play spaces, such as playgrounds or school grounds, and found or informal play spaces embedded within everyday urban infrastructures, including alleys, roads, vacant plots and domestic thresholds. Through these methods, children represented shared access spaces, improvised play materials and fluid boundaries between public and domestic domains, highlighting how play is negotiated across formal and informal spatial conditions.

Analysis of the visual, narrative and spatial data shows how children make sense of disrupted urban environments by adapting play practices, restoring familiarity and reasserting spatial claims. Children’s play emerges as relational, mobile and contingent on place-based knowledge developed through everyday movement and social ties. By foregrounding children’s engagements with informal play spaces, this paper contributes to alternative visions of progress that recognise children’s situated knowledge and agency within contexts of urban informality and incremental change.