UC Berkeley

This dissertation is a historical investigation of the urban politics and mythic spaces produced in southeastern Nigeria, particularly in the port city of Old Calabar. As a city with a distinctive, and what some call “decentralized” and fragmented urban geography, this project draws connections between contemporary zoning strategies and these historical socio-spatial constructs, or “protozones”. These protozones, which were loosely tied together by secretive juridical systems and cultural codes, can be seen as a precursors and potential anticipatory diagrams for the splintering forms of urbanism emerging globally today. Borrowing the concept of “paradigmatic spaces”, this dissertation is organized around a series of spatial designations, or diagrams of spatial relationships that were exemplary during a given time period in Old Calabar’s urban history. This dissertation employs four spaces as representative of particular socio-historical relationships in Old Calabar—the compound, the masquerade, the offshore, and the zone. The historical imbrication of these four models combined with a flexible application of their spatio-temporal boundaries, provide a useful matrix for understanding the architectural and urban history of Old Calabar and challenging the novelty attributed to contemporary neoliberal free trade zones. The dissertation provides a productive case study for theorizing architecture and urbanism from the historicized periphery.