Presentation short abstract

An empirical case study of Lagos' (Nigeria) lagoon waterfronts inhabitation between climate chaos, urban expansion, and self provision: when plastics and water coalesce into life sustaining practices that defeat climate action rhetorics by owning socio-ecological and hydro-geological uncertainty.

Presentation long abstract

In the context of ongoing anthropogenic climate chaos and large scale biodiversity and ecosystems loss, coastal futures are at the forefront of transforming landscapes – most intuitively because of sea level rise. Waterfront changes are a most pressing transformation due to the great proportion of humans living by coasts. The particularity of coastal systems - fragile and now vulnerabilised - demands urgent attention, especially as they enmesh geoecologies and water with livelihoods and life sustaining functions. Presenting ongoing work on inhabitation in Lagos’ (Nigeria) lagoon islands and waterways, the presentation considers the entangled possibilities of oil and water in the age of Plastics, where making do with affordable, colourful, and quite designedly plastic objects extends the grammars of inhabiting urban marginalised spatialities. That is, where urban habitation in self-built environments - often reliant on multiple solidarities to stand against dispossessive and violent urban processes - complicates the applicability of globally circulated climate adaptation and mitigation measures. Attending to the ephemeral and un-heroic practices that animate and sustain amphibious lives along the lagoon waterfronts, I examine the lagoon inhabitants’ affordances of the local socio-ecological and hydro-geological formations as more than materialisations of vernacular culture. They are modulations of matter, technology and climate that call into question mutual care, intersectional urban violence and livelihood infrastructures for inhabiting coasts at times of climate chaos.