Oluwafemi Olajide is a Senior Lecturer in Urban Planning at the Department of Environmental Management, Lincoln University, New Zealand. He is also an affiliate of the Informal Sustainability Lab. Prior to this, he was a Lecturer in Urban and Regional Planning at the University of Lagos, Nigeria, and an ERC Research Fellow at the Polytechnic of Turin. He holds a PhD in Planning from Newcastle University, Newcastle upon Tyne, United Kingdom. More broadly, he is profoundly concerned about urban affairs, with a particular focus on the intersections of governance, urban development, and socio-spatial justice within the domains of livelihoods, informality, housing rights, and grassroots social movements. His current work explores coloniality and racialisation of informality and the decoloniality of urban informality as a pathway to socio-spatial justice in Africa.  In Lagos Nigeria, from a socio-spatial justice lens, Oluwafemi is exploring the historical legacies of forced evictions and socio-spatial displacements and how they might inform urban future in the face of rapid urbanisation, climate change, and state-led modernist urban development interventions. Connected to this, he is interested in the politics of social movements and the right to the city discourse as counter-hegemony to enduring urban structural injustices and the paradox of urban neoliberal development.

Recent Publications

Olajide, O. A. (2023). Coloniality and racialization of informality. Dialogues in Human Geography. https://doi.org/10.1177/20438206231217572

Olajide, O., Lawanson, T. (2023). Are Social Movements Achieving the Right to Adequate Housing in Lagos, Nigeria?. In: Rubin, M., Charlton, S., Klug, N. (eds) Housing in African Cities. GeoJournal Library(). Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-37408-1_5

Olajide, O., Lawanson, T., Odekunle, D. (2023). Urban Governance and Covid-19 Response in Nigeria: Who Is Left Behind?. In: Arndt, S., Banhoro, Y., Lawanson, T., Msindo, E., Simatei, P. (eds) Covid-19 in Africa: Governance and Containment. African Histories and Modernities. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham.
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-36139-5_5

Olajide, O., & Lawanson, T. (2022). Urban paradox and the rise of the neoliberal city: Case study of Lagos, Nigeria. Urban Studies, 59(9), 1763-1781.
https://doi.org/10.1177/00420980211014461