Ex nihilo urbanization in Nigeria: Colonial legacies, privatization, and foreign actors
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Over the past 2 decades, Nigeria has become a hotspot for the creation of new cities, with a dozen currently underway. While new cities in Nigeria are promoted by their developers as necessary for addressing the urban challenges plaguing cities, including overcrowding, housing deficits, a lack of amenities, and poor transportation infrastructure, we suggest that new cities in Nigeria are products of neoliberal urban policies and that they prioritize luxury and exclusivity. The current new city boom in Nigeria tracks with the global proliferation of projects of similar scale and ambition, but our research highlights that building ex nihilo new cities has a long history in Nigeria dating back to British colonialism. This paper identifies 39 ex nihilo urban mega-developments carried out in Nigeria since the British colonial era and examines their strategic locations and rationales, the key actors involved, and the urban practices guiding their creation in three distinct eras—colonial, post-independence, and contemporary—in order to understand the continuities and differences in new city development over time.
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Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it