Omoyeni Aderewa Fulani, & *Olaitan Titilopemi Wahab
Department of Architecture, Covenant University, Ota, Ogun State, Nigeria
*Corresponding author: olaitan.wahabpgs@stu.cu.edu.ng
ABSTRACT
High-rise residential buildings in Lagos rely heavily on water stored, pumped, and distributed within the building, because public supply is limited. Whether they deliver adequate pressure and continuous supply depends on design decisions that regulation could check. This study examined how far Lagos regulatory instruments translate the technical requirements of building water systems into criteria that can be assessed and verified. A qualitative document analysis was conducted on seven instruments: the National Building Code 2006, the 2019 Lagos planning permit and building-control regulations, the Lagos Environmental Management and Protection Law 2017, and comparators from Singapore, South Africa and the United Kingdom. Provisions were coded at clause level against six performance dimensions and two regulatory mechanisms. The building code requires plumbing plans, tests, and inspection before approval, but delegates their technical criteria to a plumbing code whose own schedule does not name, even though it sets measurable criteria for fire-fighting water. The planning regulations require 20,000 litres of underground storage above four floors, a fixed volume unrelated to demand, and the building-control regulations require an annual water-quality test. No measurable criterion was identified in the Nigerian and Lagos instruments for outlet pressure, demand-linked storage, maintainability, or hydraulic commissioning, whereas Singapore states height-linked supply and demand-linked storage. The framework thus recognises building water systems without a clear standard for assessing them, a regulatory translation gap. The study recommends naming a plumbing standard in the code and introducing staged, verifiable water-system requirements from approval to occupancy, subject to local validation.
Keywords: Building regulation; Translation gap; High-rise housing; Water systems; Building control; Lagos