The incremental houses of urban fringes: Yoruba personhood and popular culture in Ibadan, Nigeria

This article, based on a qualitative study of incremental self-help housing in a peripheral neighbourhood of Ibadan, southwest Nigeria, focuses on the motivation for homeownership of urban low-income earners. It offers an anthropological perspective, with particular attention paid to social embedding of homeownership. The article depicts incremental homes as reflective of a local consciousness of personhood and autonomy, as well a response to a growing urban culture of homeownership. I argue that people move into the incremental homes they build through self-help as owner-occupiers so as to attain a level of social ostentation that by popular accounts confers personhood on the individual, and likewise as a protest against the unequal power relationship between low-income renters and city landlords in Nigeria. In either case, the article reckons the poor-quality homes as occurring altogether as a material expression of both an enduring and emerging worldview of the self and self-actualisation.