Imaginary or Real Smart Cities: Critical Exploration of Nigerian Digital Citizens’ Lagos Floods Debates with the Government

Keywords: Digital Citizenship, E-Governance, Flood Management, Netnography
Abstract Type: Virtual Paper Abstract

Abstract

The environment has long been classified into two broad groups: Physical and human. However, recently, there has been a steady growth in the number of studies on the virtual space due to active participation in varying discourses. Flooding is one such issue that perennially bedevils the city of Lagos, a pacesetter of the smart city initiative in Nigeria. This study aims to explore the ongoing discourse between netizens and government about the issue of flooding in Lagos, Nigeria. This study employs a purposive sampling procedure, a non-probability sampling method, to strategically select Lagos State official handles on X (former Twitter) and Facebook (@followlasg; @LasgMoE). Digital ethnography (netnography) will be employed to analyse debates on these social media platforms where Nigerian netizens express complaints, engage in public discourse, and how they perceive government’s responsiveness and management of flood disasters. Considering inadequate infrastructure and the problem of climate change, this study proposes to analyse online narratives and the dynamics between government and netizens. Analysing Lagos State-related tweets, user interactions and hashtags would reveal the role of virtual spaces for realistic flood discourse between netizens, e-government and other concerned stakeholders. This study seeks to determine how Lagos is being governed by stakeholders on social media handles and netizens' reactions to them what forms of city users create or perceive about incessant flood occurrence and how they negotiate these realities. Thus, achieving a better understanding of digital citizenship, e-governance, and disaster management in Nigeria.