Urbanisation-induced displacements in peri-urban areas: Clashes between customary tenure and statutory practices in Ugbo-Okonkwo Community in Enugu, Nigeria

•Urban expansion in Nigeria is convoluted by power play and land expropriation.•Cracks in plural tenure systems either work to promote or impede displacements.•Inter-tenure frictions inhere clashes in jurisdictional, legal and planning systems.•The urban poor have used litigation and resistance tactics to halt forced eviction. Rapid urbanisation is precipitating wide-ranging and often irreversible changes in cities and at the shifting peri-urban areas around the world. As a significant factor of change in the 21st Century, urbanisation is irreversibly transforming everything on its path―air, land, water, and ecology, including institutions, customs, and lifestyles. The subject scope of urbanisation research is therefore quite wide and diverse. Yet, urbanisation-induced attritions and substitutions of customary tenure practices, coupled with the associated politics and resistances, remain utterly overlooked. Using a mixed method approach (involving desktop research, remote sensing data and stakeholder interviews), this paper examines the clashes between customary tenure regime and statutory practices dictated by urban laws, and how different stakeholders are appropriating them both to promote and resist displacement or eviction. Amidst growing encroachment pressures on peri-urban communities in Nigerian cities, a new imperative for enhanced tenure security and integrated planning approach are proposed.