Analysis of Brownfields in Ilorin, Nigeria

Brownfield is a capacious term for abandoned industrial sites, areas with toxic pasts, previously developed sites, or wasteland often found in low-income, marginalised urban areas. Due to the historical, legal, and policy differences shaping brownfield formation and redevelopment, they convey different meanings to scholars at various times. However, these perspectives remain shaped by the global north narratives. The adoption of conceptual frameworks like urban political ecology (UPE) and slow violence suffers limitations due to the general complacency and reluctance of southern scholars to employ these conceptual tools to investigate the unnaturalness of brownfields in appearance, shape, or size. Consequently, this thesis employs UPE to investigate brownfields as a ‘contested geography’ produced by socio-political struggle. By leveraging residents’ lived experiences, perceptions, and articulations, it draws on slow violence theory to unearth the everyday harm produced by slow, unobserved, insidious socio-ecological changes of brownfields operating on the workings of time. This thesis employed qualitative and quantitative approaches. It combined methods, such as questionnaire administration, interviews, elite interviews, visual methodologies, and slow observation, to capture these socio-ecological changes (both spatial and temporal). Firstly, the findings revealed the spatial distribution, acreage sizes, and nature of previous and current uses of brownfield sites as a building block to creating a functional brownfield policy in Ilorin. Secondly, the findings travelled back in time to reveal the social changes caused by brownfields, including out-of-sight displacements, uneven day and night worlds, increased pressure on the community, the demise of historic businesses, and a decline in property values. Human impacts highlight how specific materialities, such as stench, waste, and disease elements, redistribute populations in unexpected ways and exacerbate residential segregation. It shows how brownfield-induced advanced marginality is a byproduct of the political system’s decision of who lives or dies. The non-human impacts demonstrate how brownfields gradually transform idealised landscapes into unintentional ones. Additionally, the findings highlight disproportionate exposure to brownfield brutalities along gender lines. The thesis emphasised that the unequal heft places women at the frontline of exposure, which is attributed to the combined intensity of patriarchy and cultural redoubt preventing women from participating in remediation meetings. Thirdly, the thesis revealed how brownfields induce ecological grief, reduce the abundance of ruderal plants, and contribute to the poverty level of brownfield communities. Finally, it capitalizes on residents’ experiences to explore the multiple power fields (within or far-off) shaping brownfield remediation, and how new development bypassing community engagement can produce new waves of destruction far more devastating than those found in brownfields. This study concludes that brownfields in a habitually challenging, messy, and ‘hard-to-read’ African cities demand religious attention that mobilises new methods, concepts, and imaginative thinking to pursue and secure a just urban environment.

Citation

Aduloju, O. T. (2026). Analysis of Brownfields in Ilorin, Nigeria [Unpublished doctoral thesis]. University of Chester.

Publisher

University of Chester

URI

https://chesterrep.openrepository.com/handle/10034/629934

Type

Thesis or dissertation

Language

en