Abuja

Over 85% of Abuja's residents live in informal housing — in a city that was purpose-built from scratch to replace Lagos as Nigeria's capital. The Federal Capital Territory, home to roughly 4 million people at 476 metres elevation in central Nigeria, was designed by Japanese architect Kenzo Tange and decreed into existence in 1976 to solve a specific problem: Lagos, situated in the Yoruba-dominated southwest, had become overcrowded, ethnically partisan, and geographically constrained on islands with no room to expand. Abuja would sit at Nigeria's geographic centre, neutral ground for a nation of 250 ethnic groups.

Construction began in 1979; the capital officially moved on 21 December 1991 under General Ibrahim Babangida. What the planning intended and what actually emerged are two different cities. The monumental core — the National Assembly, the Presidential Villa, the Central Mosque and National Church placed symmetrically — functions as designed. But some surrounding areas grew at 20-30% annually as migrants flooded in for government jobs and proximity to federal spending.

But some surrounding areas grew at 20-30% annually as migrants flooded in for government jobs and proximity to federal spending.

The planned city couldn't absorb them. Squatter settlements like Nyanya, Sauka, and Kauru proliferated on vacant government land, and a demolition campaign beginning in 2003 evicted tens of thousands without resolving the underlying mismatch between planned capacity and actual demand. The Gbagyi people, original inhabitants of the territory, were displaced without proper compensation — their land declared 'no man's land' by federal decree.

Meanwhile Lagos, stripped of its capital status, continued growing regardless, retaining its position as Nigeria's economic centre of gravity. Abuja illustrates niche construction in the political-ecological sense: a government artificially created an environment to house itself, but the environment attracted organisms — migrants, informal economies, squatter settlements — that the original design couldn't accommodate. The planned city functions like a coral reef's calcium carbonate skeleton: the engineered structure provides the framework, but the actual living community that colonises it follows its own logic, filling every available space regardless of the architect's intentions.