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Climate change at the margins of the megacity: informal settlements’ adaptation infrastructures
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DOI：10.1080/17565529.2026.2679005.png)
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Abstract
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Megacities face mounting tensions between development imperatives and climate resilience, particularly affecting marginalized communities in informal settlements. This study examines how residents of informal settlements in Lagos, Nigeria, navigate climate impacts while confronting exclusion from formal adaptation planning. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork across 20 settlements, this research introduces two key concepts: adaptation infrastructures – socio-technical systems that systematically organize practices, knowledge and materials to manage climate impacts while fulfilling resource needs – and adaptation livelihoods – economic activities addressing climate needs while providing income. Residents construct sophisticated systems including bridging networks, land stabilization through waste processing, and water distribution serving both settlements and the broader city. However, Lagos State's vision of becoming ‘The Next Dubai’ creates misalignment between formal planning and community capacities. When settlements are demolished under climate protection rhetoric, adaptation infrastructures are dismantled, dispersing residents without their networks and practices. These findings challenge deficit-based vulnerability models and suggest pathways for equitable adaptation that recognize existing community capacities rather than displacing them through development-oriented interventions. While everyday adaptations have been widely documented, this paper is among the first to analyse them across urban scales, identifying empirical examples of adaptation livelihoods and infrastructures operating simultaneously at the individual or household, settlement and city scales.
Keywords:
Adaptation
climate change
socioeconomic vulnerability
informality
settlements
megacity
everyday life
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