Air, rubber, and repair: a visual urban ethnography of the worlds of tyres in megacity Lagos, Nigeria

This visual essay explores the overlapping worlds of tyres in Lagos, Africa's largest megacity, as a lens through which to examine the entanglements of labour, infrastructure, mobility, and urban informality. Drawing on the Pneuma-City project and sustained collaboration with a Lagos-based photographer, the essay traces the tyre across three registers: as an object of continuous repair by roadside vulcanizers; as waste accumulating in streets, waterways, and peripheral dumpsites; and as repurposed material improvised into the fabric of everyday urban life. Grounded in object-oriented ethnography, the essay foregrounds the practices of vulcanizers alongside the diverse afterlives of rubber as it circulates through Lagos's social and material ecologies. Photographs function not only as documentary evidence but as active mediators of meaning, recognition, and collaborative inquiry. Together, images and ethnographic encounters reveal a city sustained by fragile yet inventive practices of repair, reuse, and improvisation, in which the tyre serves as a particularly revealing index of the precarity, creativity, and contested governance of urban life in the Global South.