Makoko, a centuries-old waterfront settlement on the Lagos Lagoon in Nigeria, stands at a fraught intersection of environmental vulnerability, urban pressure, and human resilience. Established in the nineteenth century by fishing communities, predominantly members of the Egun people from Badagry and neighbouring coastal regions, Makoko emerged as an informal water-based settlement where livelihoods became inseparably tied to ecology, waterways, and indigenous knowledge systems. Long before sustainability entered development policy vocabulary, Makoko evolved as a human response to environmental constraint — a community shaped by tides, seasonal rains, lagoon currents, and fragile aquatic ecosystems.
For generations, Makoko developed adaptive living practices that responded organically to fluctuating water levels and climatic risk. Canoes, not cars, became the dominant mode of transport. Fishing, smoked-fish trade, and lagoon-based commerce formed the backbone of the local economy. Informal waste reuse systems, shared water access, and communal trade networks reflected a low-carbon adaptation to an environment largely absent of formal infrastructure. This was not sustainability by policy design, but sustainability by environmental necessity, an indigenous form of ecological urbanism grounded in survival rather than planning documents.
Makoko’s environmental intelligence gained global visibility through the Makoko Floating School, designed by architect Kunlé Adeyemi. Widely recognised as one of the first purpose-built floating schools in Africa, the structure became an international symbol of climate-adaptive architecture and sustainable design thinking. Though the structure itself was temporary, its symbolic value was enduring. The floating school reframed Makoko from being perceived solely as a “slum” to being recognised as a climate innovation space, a site where architecture, sustainability, and indigenous adaptation intersected. It demonstrated that vulnerable waterfront communities are not merely climate victims but can be climate solution zones, capable of generating models for flood-resilient infrastructure, floating sanitation systems, and adaptive housing in an era of rising sea levels. In environmental discourse, the project repositioned Makoko within global sustainability narratives and climate resilience planning.
Yet this narrative of resilience now coexists with one of the most severe environmental and humanitarian crises in the community’s modern history. On 23 December 2025, the Lagos State Government initiated a large-scale demolition campaign targeting homes and structures along the lagoon. Bulldozers and amphibious excavators cleared wooden stilts, houses, shops, and ancillary structures in sections of the settlement, displacing tens of thousands of residents and erasing built ecosystems that had evolved in equilibrium with the water environment.
The official justification invoked public safety and urban management concerns, particularly the removal of structures allegedly built too close to high-tension power transmission lines traversing parts of the community. Authorities stated that the intervention was limited to enforcing a 30-metre safety setback from the transmission corridor. However, residents, community leaders, and civil society organisations documented that demolition extended far beyond this boundary, with large sections of the community cleared without prior notice, consultation, compensation, or resettlement planning.
Governor Babajide Sanwo-Olu and state officials maintained that the demolition was necessary to prevent potential hazards to life and property, arguing that informal dwellings beneath electrical infrastructure posed unacceptable risks. The government also alleged that some NGOs were exploiting the crisis for fundraising purposes rather than delivering tangible support to affected families, introducing further complexity into the governance narrative. Regardless of institutional motivations, the outcome on the ground was catastrophic: thousands of people were rendered homeless in a matter of days.
From an environmental perspective, the consequences were immediate and severe. Families lost shelter, sanitation access, clean water sources, food storage spaces, and safe living conditions. Heavy rainfall shortly after the demolition left displaced residents exposed on canoes, makeshift platforms, and overcrowded temporary spaces with no protection from disease vectors or environmental hazards. The collapse of basic infrastructure intensified public health risks, particularly water-borne diseases and sanitation-related illnesses.
The disruption to fishing livelihoods was equally devastating. Many families depended on daily catches for food security and income. The demolition destroyed storage facilities, smoking platforms, market access routes, and canoe docking points, collapsing informal value chains that had sustained the community for generations. The fishing economy, the ecological backbone of Makoko, was structurally damaged. School attendance reportedly declined sharply as families struggled with displacement, survival logistics, and loss of income, creating long-term human capital risks for the broader Lagos economy.
Public safety rationales, when weighed against these outcomes, reveal a deeper structural problem. Demolition without resettlement is not environmental protection; it is environmental displacement. Without transitional housing frameworks, livelihood protection strategies, or ecological integration planning, displaced populations are forced into deeper vulnerability, homelessness, unemployment, and social fragmentation. Lagos, already facing one of Africa’s most severe housing shortages, risks amplifying urban inequality and environmental insecurity if displacement becomes a default governance tool.
Makoko’s crisis echoes a historical precedent with disturbing parallels: the 1990 demolition of the Maroko settlement in Lagos, near what is now the Victoria Island axis. In that case, authorities forcibly displaced thousands of low-income residents under the banner of land reclamation and urban development. The cleared land was later repurposed for high-end real estate and elite infrastructure, while displaced residents pursued legal redress for decades without comprehensive restitution. Today, the area that once housed Maroko has become one of Lagos’s most expensive urban zones.
The structural pattern is familiar: informal settlements in ecologically valuable zones are framed as environmental risks, removed through state power, and the cleared land is subsequently absorbed into high-value urban development circuits. This is not environmental regeneration, it is spatial reallocation of ecological value from subsistence communities to capital markets.
Waterfront zones like Makoko are not empty wastelands. They are living ecological systems where human survival, biodiversity, and environmental knowledge are intertwined. The fishing economy sustains food security. The stilt housing systems interact with lagoon hydrology. The community’s daily practices shape micro-ecosystems along the shoreline. Erasing such settlements disrupts not only social systems but ecological knowledge systems that could inform climate adaptation strategies in coastal cities.
From an environmental justice perspective, this represents a form of eco-inequality. Natural spaces are redefined as investment assets rather than survival ecosystems. Lagoons become luxury views instead of food systems. Waterfronts become private capital zones instead of communal ecological spaces. Environmental value becomes monetised, while environmental access becomes restricted.
True sustainability cannot exist without social inclusion. Climate adaptation that displaces communities is not resilience, it is relocation. Green infrastructure that excludes indigenous livelihoods is not sustainability, it is ecological elitism. Environmental policy that prioritises real estate valuation over human survival is not development, it is environmental injustice.
The larger environmental and urban challenge is systemic. Informal communities like Makoko emerge in part because of failures in formal housing provision, urban planning, and inclusive governance. They occupy marginal lands not because of choice alone, but because exclusion from formal systems forces adaptive settlement in ecologically fragile zones. Displacing such communities without integrative planning weakens both human resilience and ecological stability.
Globally, sustainable urban development frameworks emphasiseinclusive, participatory planning, slum upgrading, secure tenure, climate-resilient infrastructure, and community-led hazard mitigation. Best practice models focus on integration, not erasure, upgrading communities in place rather than removing them from the urban ecosystem. Forced demolition without resettlement generates homelessness, unemployment, socialfragmentation, and long-term urban instability, outcomes fundamentally incompatible with sustainable development principles.
Makoko therefore raises fundamental questions for Lagos and other rapidly urbanising African megacities:
– Can governments balance public safety and modernization with environmental justice and human rights?
– Can riverine settlements be upgraded in place, retaining their ecological livelihoods while gaining basic services and climate resilience?
– Or will waterfront land be reframed exclusively as high-value real estate, displacing the very populations whose environmental adaptations predated formal city planning?
Makoko’s residents are not merely displaced people; they represent a living ecological culture shaped by water, fishing, collective survival, and climate adaptation. Their removal from ancestral lagoon spaces severs deep interdependencies between culture, place, and environment.
A genuinely sustainable response must transcend demolition. It must include transparent dialogue, community participation, secure tenure frameworks, comprehensive resettlement planning, climate-resilient housing upgrades, floating sanitation systems, renewable energy micro-grids, clean water infrastructure, and the protection of fishing livelihoods as part of Lagos’s blue-economy strategy. Sustainability must mean integration, not displacement.
Without such measures, Makoko’s demolition will not be remembered as an exercise in public safety. It will be remembered as another episode in which environmental language masked social exclusion, and urban ambition displaced the most vulnerable.
The true test of environmental progress in Lagos is not the number of luxury waterfront buildings constructed, but the number of vulnerable communities protected while cities evolve.
Makoko is not an environmental problem to be solved. It is an environmental system to be understood, protected, and integrated.
