This dissertation explores the social and political uses of 360° videography in three West African the urban contexts of Lagos, Cotonou and Dakar. It builds on an original methodological approach that combines ethnographic fieldwork, co-creation, and filmic self-elicitation, in order to examine how 360° videography participates in the making of urban imaginaries.

The thesis shows how, when mobilized by the promoters of large-scale urban projects, this technology operates as an instrument of aesthetic governmentality, materializing futuristic visions that erase collective memories and legitimize processes of dispossession. Conversely, when reappropriated by media-activist collectives, the 360° camera becomes a tool of resistance and self-representation, capable of producing counter-narratives and reinscribing dissonant pasts into digital space.

The three articles that compose the dissertation successively develop a critique of immersive apparatuses of urban legitimation, an analysis of the ambivalence of their reappropriation, and a theoretical reflection on phantasmagoria as a framework for interpreting sociotechnical imaginaries.

This research thus contributes to a critical geography of imaginaries, showing that the production of the urban also unfolds on a sensitive and spectral terrain, shaped by immersive technologies and the imaginaries they carry.