Theron, Patricia Frances d'Altera2025-07-092024Theron, Patricia Frances d'Altera. (2024). Lagos as a Metropolitan Assemblage: Reading the Layering and Complexity in Urban Infrastructure [PhD thesis, University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg]. WIReDSpace.https://hdl.handle.net/10539/45358A research report submitted in fulfillment of the requirements for the Doctor of Philosophy in Architecture, In the Faculty of Engineering and the Built Environment , School of Architecture and Planning, University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, 2024This thesis uses concepts that make up assemblage in Deleuze to explain an emergence of process and pattern in the urban setting of Lagos, as revealed through systems of physical infrastructure designed in relation to the network of waterways. Activities of the British Colonial Office, concentrated on accessibility of the Lagos port during the First World War, provide the initial focus. In the post-independence period, and after the Civil War (1967-1970), Lagos was a centre of exhibition for oil- wealth projects under the Nigerian Federal Military Government. Major infrastructure contracts were awarded to German-Nigerian firm, Julius Berger, which underwent a process of indigenisation in Nigeria. In 1975, a crisis of congestion resulted in a stasis at the Lagos port, with state-response involving infrastructural and legal resolutions. Julius Berger Nigeria (JBN) was to complete a new port at Tin Can Island in only 15 months, while simultaneously carrying out other extensive projects in Lagos. These undertakings would provide the blueprint for future operations at scale, and for the consolidation of the company’s footprint in territorial terms. The conceptual contribution lies in an exploration of the uses of ‘territorialisation’ and ‘coding’ that stabilise or disrupt, consolidate or expand social territories. Infrastructural projects are subject to social interactions that are coded, decoded or overcoded in organisations that are themselves forming and shaping as groups. The way in which social territories are held together through language, visual symbolism, codes of conduct and national law, constitutes this study, enabling observation of Nigeria’s complex infrastructural programmes, with emergent factors representing the binding elements at organisational and territorial levels. The archive is itself understood as an assemblage, bringing together resources of disparate origin, with Colonial Office and JBN records revealing an alternate and imagined Lagos, and effecting a reterritorialisation shaped in narrative terms. This reading attempts to speak to the complexity, in a vision of processes and interactions that were evolving and reacting in these historical periods, to respond to the question of how social territories are held together as a fabric, with processes of territorialisation and coding seen as manipulations of that fabric. Infrastructural projects are read in relation to wider strategic objectives of the Colonial Administration and the Nigerian State, involving intricate social and technical interrelations in implementation of programmes, with ideas functioning at the level of individual attitude and systemically.en© 2024 University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg. All rights reserved. The copyright in this work vests in the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg. No part of this work may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, without the prior written permission of University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg.UCTDLagosInfrastructurAssemblageThesisUniversity of the Witwatersrand, JohannesburgSDG-11: Sustainable cities and communities