Dr Lindsay Sawyer

Lindsay is a Leverhulme Early Career Research Fellow undertaking a project on ‘Tacit Governance and Land Tenure in Lagos’ (2018-2021), and a Researcher on the UKRI-GCRF-ARUA project ‘Migration, Urbanisation and Conflict in Africa (MUCA)’ (2021-2023) lead by Addis Ababa University. The research covers nine cities across Ethiopia, Nigeria and Uganda with a team of 17 researchers.

Lindsay’s research interests focus on the role of land and urban governance in the urbanization of Lagos, Nigeria, where she has been going for ten years. Her research is concerned with confronting urban theory, especially related to informality, with the grounded realities of African urbanism. Lindsay’s work looks to build new theories and concepts from grounded research, and exploring comparative methods as a way to do this. Lindsay has been involved in comparative work across Lagos, Mexico City, Istanbul, Kolkata and Shenzhen through the project ‘Planetary Urbanisation in Comparative Context’, and is now exploring new comparative possibilities in the MUCA project.

Lindsay sees the support and amplification of Southern scholarship as vitally important. Lindsay and Dr Taibat Lawanson of the Centre for Housing and Sustainable Development, University of Lagos, were awarded a British Academy Writing Workshop grant in 2020, where the urban scholarship of 14 Nigerian academics is being developed through mentorship and workshops.

Lindsay is an editor at CITY: Analysis of urban change, theory, action, and part of the editorial collective of Otherwise magazine. Lindsay is also a co-organiser of the Urban ECR Network at Sheffield.

Lindsay gained her doctorate from ETH Zurich (2016) after working as a researcher at the Future Cities Laboratory, Singapore and as a visiting scholar at the African Centre for Cities, Cape Town. She has previous degrees in Architecture (2009) and The City (2010) from the University of Edinburgh. Lindsay has also held an Honorary Research position at the Global Development Institute at the University of Manchester.