Walls and Ancestors: Spatial Organisation and Tensions in the Evolving Built Environment of Urhobo Architectural Tradition in Nigeria

This paper explores the relationship between Urhobo architectural tradition and anthropology.It investigates the traditional lifestyle of neighbours who live in intentionally built structures without walls, which enabled communal living, and how modernity and globalisation threaten these ways of life.The Urhobo people, in their traditional built-environment live in 'nucleated' settlements, which are not built around physical central features but around a mental central kinship belief system.They have no physically well-defined boundaries, so neighbours, who are traditionally kinsmen live together communally.However, as traditional social and cultural practices get eroded by factors of modernity and globalisation, social tensions become inevitable.Modernity obstructs communalism and the adoption of Western cultures has changed people's mindset toward one another, and this modern trend affects how houses and compounds are now constructed.This study uses autoethnography and compares childhood memories of living in Urhobo vernacular spaces with a recent ethnographic fieldwork experience of social trends in the same location.It explores the relationship between architectural spaces and human behaviour towards these spaces in a changing world.In addition to direct observations, and interviews, Interpretive Phenomenological Analysis (IPA) was adopted to explore the lived experiences of participants in Urhobo vernacular architectural landscape.These approaches were to help extract the ethnographic context of the relationship between the architecture of the Urhobo people and their social lifestyles and coexistence.The findings of the study indicate that the traditional friendly social relations of kinsmen are declining drastically and boundary disputes and other social tensions among neighbours are increasing. Understanding the Urhobo Community Context Location of UrhoboThe Urhobo people traditionally live in twenty-four kingdoms in eight local government areas of Delta State, in southern Nigeria.There are also indigenous communities of Urhobo people in Bayelsa State,