Lagos; Discovering the Mega City - Newsletter September 2010

Thisis LAgos

This is Lagos - Newsletter September 2010

‘Welcome to Lagos – It’ll defy your expectations’, a three part BBC documentary broadcasted in April this year, fired the debate on how to picture Africa and more particularly Lagos as a place to live. Bukka Trust, founded in 2003 by a group of Nigerian architects operating in London and Nigeria, picked up this discussion from an urban point of view. On 18 June they filled the floor of the Brunei Gallery Lecture Theatre of the Centre for Oriental and African Studies of the University of London with a panel to discuss ‘Lagos … Mega City or Crisis City?’. The lively debate which followed was far from concluded by the time the event was closed as we read in Godson Egbo’s report. This was the reason we invited Bukka to guest edit this edition of the ArchiAfrika newsletter. We are keen to stage the continuation of this discussion in our newsletters and on the website and are very happy that Bukka accepted the invitation to become guest editor for this issue. Contributions of Godson Egbo, Papa Omotayo and Giles Omezi will give you insight in the development of Lagos, the specific position of Lagos Island and of course the debate with critical reflections on current developments Feel free to react!

The focus on Nigeria in this newsletter turns the spotlight to the Nigerian eminent architect Demas Nwoko. Antoni Folkers reviews the publication ‘The Architecture of Demas Nwoko’, published in 2007 and edited by John Godwin and Gillian Hopwood. The full review can be found on the ArchiAfrika website.

In Casablanca, ArchiAfrika board member Abdelmoumen Benabdeljalil from the Ecole Supérieure de l’Architecture in collaboration with the Ordre National des Architectes de Maroc is working hard on the preparations of African Perspectives 2011. You will hear from this soon. Board member Ola Uduku took part in the Docomomo conference in Mexico in August. She tabled the position of Modernist heritage in Africa, the place it has in education and used the results of the ArchiAfrika workshops in Dar es Salaam in 2005 as case. A report in her visit can be found on the website soon.

Joe Osae – Addo, chair of our board, will soon also chair the jury of the Blueprints of Paradise competition, launched by the Afrika Museum and African Architecture Matters. The deadline is approaching soon, we hope that you can give him and his fellow jury members a hard time by overwhelming them with fantastic proposals. In the next newsletter we hope to be able to shed some light on the outcome.

Report

‘Delirious Lagos’Kaye Whiteman The great challenge for Lagos is that of the ever-expanding city which is growing into the 21st century megalopolis, soon to be one of the world’s largest. It is now estimated conservatively, including by the UN. to be anything between 15m. and 18m, and is expected to reach a possible 25m. by 2015, and by 2025 is expected to be the third largest city in the world.

The 2006 census came up with the curiously low population figure of over 9m. It is true that figure was for Lagos State, not taking into account the numbers in the Lagos conurbation that are found over the border in Ogun State. Evenso, it was still a serious under-counting. Another explanation was that many of the immigrants from other States living in Lagos went to their home States to be counted. There was still concrete evidence, however, of imperfection in the census exercise, and perceived inefficiencies in the count, although there was no proof of deliberate under-counting. Governor Fashola has said that Lagos State rejected the figures and produced their own figure of over 17m, compiled by their own parallel census officers, which he insisted were the authentic figures, which could be used as a basis for planning. They are certainly more in line with international estimates.

The image of Lagos often presented outside Nigeria is that of one of the world’s most turbulent and alarming cities that brings a shudder when you mention it, but is not the reality different? Rem Koolhaas, the controversial avant-garde Dutch architect, for

example, has put forward a different perspective: he finds the idea of Lagos as a hyper-anarchic twenty-first century city intolerably exhilarating, in keeping with his general thrill at the nature of cities, seen first of all in his book on ‘Delirious New York’, a title he could equally have applied (and may yet) to our present subject matter, as ‘Delirious Lagos’.

Behind some of his more eccentric hyperbolae, he has hit on one truth - the logic of the city’s profound sense of autonomy. What helps Lagos work is a myriad of functioning ad hoc structures, a lot of them dependent on and interwoven with the informal sector, but with their own set of official relationships, such as the deeply influential market organisations, and different forms of trade and professional unions from transport workers to cab drivers. The turbulent transport workers in particular are politically influential. And need to be propitiated.

At the moment there are major initiatives to get the expanding city functioning, after the ‘season of anomy’ which descended during the later years of military rule. But Lagos can never easily become Dubai or Shanghai. Its historic relationship with its hinterland is too important, and major developments from transport systems to cities within the mega-city, have to take this into account or suffer a new period of crisis or ‘season of anomy’.

Kaye Whiteman is a freelance writer and specialist on African affairs. He is living in London but travelling frequently to Africa, as he has done for the past forty-five years. With an MA degree in modern history from the University of Oxford (the Queen’s College), he worked for ten years as Deputy Editor of West Africa magazine from 1963-73 before going to work as a Public Affairs officer in the European Commission in Brussels in the directorate dealing with developing countries. He was invited back to be Editor of West Africa in 1982 and stayed with the publication for seventeen years, most of the time as Editor-in-Chief and General Manager. He returned to the international bureaucracy in 1999 for two years as Director of Information at the Commonwealth Secretariat, before moving to Lagos in 2001-3 as editorial adviser at the new financial newspaper Business Day, for whom he still writes regularly. He is also working on a book on the history and culture of Lagos in the series ‘Cities of the Imagination’.

Bukka panel (Left-Right): Jaap Klarenbeek (Urban Detectives), Kaye Whiteman, Kunle Adeyemi (OMA) and Simon GusahImage courtesy of bukka.org

Review

Debate Review: Lagos…Mega City or Crisis City ?Godson Egbo Bukka is a charitable trust founded in 2003 by Papa Omotayo, Prince Tikare, Giles Omezi, Sola Ogunbanjo and Godson Egbo. The premise for the foundation was a common fascination with Lagos in particular, and the unique character of African cities in general. As such, Bukka has presented a series of talks, debates and exhibitions on this subject, and ‘Lagos..Mega city or crisis city?’ is but the latest.

In general terms, the talk was precipitated by the furore that erupted following the BBC’s broadcasting of the television series, ‘Welcome to Lagos’. The first programme was about the life that goes on in a Lagos municipal dump; the second looked at the lives of people living in the Makoko district, which sits on the lagoon; and the third and final part looked at Esther, a young girl who lived in a shack on Bar Beach in Lagos. The series provoked strong feelings from Nigerians, and online forums were abuzz. On the one hand, some saw the series as a continuation of the west’s constant fetishisation of African lives, a sort of post-colonial peek into the African zoo, and this camp expressed no surprise; simply that their suspicions of the BBC’s motives were justified. Then again there were those who were outraged that this was a concerted effort by racist colonial powers to tarnish the ‘good’ name of the country; that they only wanted to show Nigeria and Africa in a negative light. This camp argued that, had the BBC wanted to present a balanced view, they should have shown the lives of those living and working in Victoria Island and Ikoyi, the Oxford Street and Hampstead of Lagos, respectively. But these voices of outrage were balanced by another point of view, and this was one of wonderment: wonder that these people could wrest a living out of such harsh and primeval conditions; wonder that in the face of such mountainous difficulties, people were still able to smile and go about their lives; in short, wonder at their never-say-die attitude in the face of situations that might make you or I quail in despair. This last camp drew a line connecting these resilient slum-dwellers, and the thousands of Nigerians

worldwide who are successful in all sectors of the economy: from the professions to business to academia. It provided an object lesson for so-called leaders: these people can turn shit into mud, and all of it without your help: imagine what they could achieve if you just gave them a little help….

So it was with these contrasting viewpoints in mind that Bukka decided to hold this event. People talk of Lagos as a ‘mega city’, and the achievements are lauded and magnified; but there is plainly – as illustrated by the BBC series – a class of people who have to eke out a living in the most difficult of circumstances. In spite of recent improvements, municipal provision is sorely lacking, and it was a wonder that the city functions at all.

The event was chaired by the venerable Kaye Whiteman, who is currently writing a book on Lagos and once edited the defunct West Africa magazine. To kick things off, Giles Omezi gave an introductory speech about the history of Lagos, paying particular attention to the layering of developmental infrastructural plans stretching back through the twentieth century.

Urban Detectives, a group of ex-Delft architecture graduates who conduct a series of ‘City Space Investigations’ in cities across the world, made their presentation. Prior to Lagos, they had looked at New York and Sao Paolo. Their modus operandi is to investigate the cities; then to carry what they have seen from ‘vision to concept’. So what they showed of Lagos was their preliminary investigation. To those who know Lagos, the images they showed were familiar, but the Detectives were able to draw interesting insights, particularly as they were able to come to it with a fresh eye. Their premise was: what can we learn from Lagos? And can the prevalent informal activities be integrated into urban policy and planning?

Further, they asked whether media presentations were

Figure 2_ Extract from CSI’s presentation. Image courtesy of Urban Detectives

beneficial to understanding Lagos. They suggested that programmes such as ‘Ross Kemp In Search of Pirates’, where Kemp visits the Niger Delta; and ‘Welcome to Lagos’ offer a particular view of Lagos and Nigeria. They then went on to discuss the dualities that Lagos presented. For example, the local as opposed to the foreign and the planned versus the unplanned. Finally they pondered the notion of crisis, which they defined as ‘specific, unexpected, non-routine events or series of events that create high levels of uncertainty and threat or perceived threat to an organisation’s high priority goals’.

They concluded that based on this definition, Lagos is not a city in crisis, although the city’s ‘rapid growth poses serious questions that need intelligent answers and responsive, responsible and flexible governing. (There is a) need for people with a capability to think and intervene on the high/metropolitan scale, with cultural specificities of the city in the background. Spatial thinking needs another scale that bridges planning and architecture; with the capability to make places and create a societal value.’

This conclusion, uttered with Dutch reserve, is absolutely central and will be ignored to the city’s loss.Kunle Adeyemi presented next. He is an architect from Lagos who

has spent the last few years practicing in Rotterdam with Rem Koolhaas’ OMA. OMA have been involved in Lagos for some time, and Koolhaas famously investigated the city in his book, ‘Mutations’. In it he states:

‘The fundamental conundrum of Lagos, considered as both paradigm and pathological extreme of the West African city, is its continued existence and productivity in spite of a now-complete absence of those infrastructures, systems, organisations, and amenities that define the word “city” in terms of Western planning methodology. Lagos, as an icon of West African urbanity, inverts every essential characteristic of the so-called modern city. Yet, it is still – for lack of a better word – a city; and one that works.’

This was published in 2001, when perhaps the author was still struck by the excitement of the exotic. However, Kunle Adeyemi demonstrated that the practice’s approach had moved on considerably. He presented a design for the Fourth Mainland Bridge, destined to connect Ikorodu to the fast-developing Aja/ Lekki corridor. This is a striking project less for its aesthetic (although it is

OMA’s Fourth Mainland Bridge project: interchange node

Images courtesy of OMAOMA’s Fourth Mainland Bridge project: promenade

quite beautiful) than for the thinking which generated it. The design is a twin-decked V-section, enabling vehicular transport (including a tram) to use the upper deck. The lower deck is for pedestrians, but it is more than simply a way of moving from point to point: it is a living bridge like the old London Bridge, variously accommodating shops, market stalls and open, multivalent spaces. What is impressive here is that, whilst a project of this nature must inevitably be moulded by a single hand, OMA have consciously attempted to overcome the potential pitfalls of such a ‘top down’ approach. So, the nature of the spaces on the living bridge is not defined by an order imposed by those who ‘know better’, but by a careful observation of how people actually use the city. Adeyemi showed an extremely powerful graphic device: an overhead photograph reveals a pattern in the setting out of so-called informal market vegetable stalls. This illustrates the native genius of an underlying order that is not immediately apparent from the ground. He then abstracts this pattern as the blueprint for the layout of selling-space on the bridge. This may seem fairly simple, but in Lagos and Nigeria, it represents a minor revolution. The city and nation have suffered from a series of infrastructural and architectural ‘solutions’ that range in their inappropriateness from the well-meaning but flawed (the road system whose cloverleafs and flyovers provide transient, ownerless and therefore colonisable space) to the bombastic (the bastardised offspring of a bastardised Florida classicism of many a bank and luxury apartment building). The development signals OMA’s evolution from shocked foreigner to nuanced insider.

Urban geographer Simon Gusah provided the final presentation. Without script or props, Gusah approached his topic with relish, and where Urban Detectives had carried out an almost surgical examination of the city’s spaces and rhythms, and Adeyemi had elucidated a scheme that addressed a prosaic problem with a poetic solution, Gusah set about demolishing the very edifice upon which the reality of Lagos is totteringly built. Mr Gusah is an old school firebrand. In his opinion, the greatest impediment to the success of Lagos as a city is its government, local and national. This has been historically the case, although in fairness to the state government, the city has suffered federal neglect since the establishment of Abuja as the capital. He acknowledges the difference the current administration is making:

‘Governor Fashola has demonstrated that solutions can be found (i.e. the ‘miracle’ of Oshodi’s turn-around), by engagement and investment.‘

He feels that the only crisis in Lagos is the crisis in the quality of government, and given that the economy of Lagos rivals that of some African nations, then the solutions are of the most pressing urgency not just for the city but the nation and indeed the region:

‘Lagos is a N4Tr ($30Bn) per annum economy (if Lagos was a country, it would be amongst the top 10 economies in Africa, similar in size to Kenya!), so its problems/solutions are country-sized. Despite the obvious challenges, Lagos’ per capita GDP is twice that of Nigeria as a whole, it accounts for 70% of all bank transactions and over 50% of the country’s electricity demand. So getting Lagos to work would have an obvious and immediate knock-on impact for the country as a whole.’

Further, he argues against the sanitised city. In his article ‘Welcome to the Lagos debate’, published in Next magazine, Tolu Ogunlesi describes the process where the Durban authorities had to formalise the street traders in time for the World Cup.

This process was also investigated at the 2008 Bukka presentation on Warwick Junction, Durban, where the city authorities under architect Richard Jobson worked with street traders to support them and interweave their activities more formally into the urban fabric and infrastructure. The failure to adopt such measures, and to adopt the more familiar ‘bulldozer’ approach, leads to the sterility of central Abuja, whose broad boulevards and plazas have had all life bleached out of them.

As is usual with Bukka debates, there was not sufficient time to thrash out the issues with anything like the depth that would justify the weight of the cause. But the purpose of these events is to mould and inform opinion. Bukka had invited the High Commissioner, the Governor and the makers of ‘Welcome to Lagos’. All gave excuses and none showed up. It would have been very interesting if they had, because it is these very people whom Bukka is seeking to influence.

There will – there simply must - be more of these sessions. Lagos deserves the very best. What is valuable in Lagos is its people. There are few cities in the world that possess such an intense and honest - yes, honest - energy. Its magnetism draws people in from across the Nigerian federation and much further beyond much like a blue whale sucks in krill, and they in turn feed and cultivate this landed leviathan that is fabricated from concrete and aspiration; they breathe and contribute to its funk of diesel fumes and opportunity. They, in their strife for a better life, are Lagos.

It would be a real shame if the baby went out with the bathwater in any misguided attempt to ‘modernise’ the place. Governor Fashola’s beautification of public space is picturesque enough, but it makes the city look like anywhere else, and that is certainly not a good thing. I recall sitting beneath the twin flyovers at Ojuelegba eating unfeasibly hot jolof rice and fried fish by the flickering light of the kerosene lamps of an impromptu market, and being jostled by maniacal danfo conductors screaming out their destinations: ‘Masha-Lawanson!’ ‘Palm Grove-Onikpan!’ ‘Barracks, wale!’ ….ah, those were the days. The city is chock full of those precious urban incidents and accidents that exist nowhere else. Those in whose power it is to shape the future of this wonderful place must do so with great care.

Godson Egbo

Simon Gusah Image courtesy of bukka.org

Report

the ‘Lagos Megacity’ which has captured the imagination of the world and the citizens of Lagos but appears in my opinion to lack any visible or coherent plan to buttress this vision. Instead the media machine of the state has cleverly maintained in the public realm an idea of the future being wrought using a series of initiatives and projects as props. The ‘beatification’ of the slack space of the city’s decrepit highway network, the introduction of a rapid bus transit system, the construction of a new privately funded financial district [Eko Atlantic City], Lekki Free Trade Zone [16,000 hectares of industrial real estate], the 4th Mainland Bridge, the Lagos Light Rail Project and the controversial PPP financed Lekki Toll Road all converge to convince the teeming population that Governor Fashola means well. Contrast this with the reality of dwelling densities of 9 inhabitants to a room, a lack of basic urban infrastructure and the annual flooding of the city during the rainy season and it is difficult to get excited about the Lagos Megacity aspiration. Without painting an in depth picture of gloom and doom as sketched by developmentalist thought or a slightly skewed rhetoric informed by the ‘Global/World city’ theories, these sets of contradictions appear to capture the state of the city presently; ‘This is Lagos’ it seems.

So what is Lagos? The Lagos Megacity Region, covers over 150 thousand hectares2 spilling from Lagos State into Ogun State in the north. It is located mainly on land reclaimed from the swamps and marshlands that make up the western and southern banks of the Lagos Lagoon, a shallow brackish body of water into which numerous inland rivers drain. The sand bar system which typifies the Gulf of Guinea coastline separates the Lagoon from the Atlantic and also hosts the growth corridor of Lekki. An eastward sprint of existing, planned and unplanned

This is Lagos ‘in defence of the ordinary’Giles Omezi

The sign on the highway outside Murtala Muhammed International Airport does not proclaim, “Welcome to Lagos.” It says, “This Is Lagos”—an ominous statement of fact. Olisa Izeobi, a worker in one of the sawmills along the lagoon, said, “We understand this as ‘Nobody will care for you, and you have to struggle to survive.’ ” It is the singular truth awaiting the six hundred thousand people who pour into Lagos from around West Africa every year. Their lungs will burn with smoke and exhaust; their eyes will sting; their skin will turn charcoal gray. And hardly any of them will ever leave.

The Megacity ‘ decoding the chaos of Lagos’George Packer (The New Yorker – Nov 2006)

In his 2006 article on Lagos for the New Yorker magazine, George Packer mused on the sign welcoming new arrivals to the city. Packer’s piece was the latest in a growing list of foreign writers and researchers who predictably and unimaginatively rendered the anarchic reputation of Lagos for a global audience, a reputation that the city’s dwellers have become accustomed to. Lagos has unsurprisingly evoked the consistent negative from the foreign writer over its century and a half existence as a modern metropolis, from the comments on its sanitation by Sir Richard Burton in the late nineteenth century to the ethnographic mapping of the city by the Rem Koolhaas led Harvard Project on the City team in the late 20th century.

On one hand the surprisingly successful projection of a vision for the city by the current administration contrasts starkly with the harsh reality of mass poverty and an ‘incomplete’1 urbanity which undermines the credibility of the aspirations. I refer of course to

Heading towards Lagos Island on the Third Mainland Bridge. Image courtesy of bukka.org

urbanization that appears in a hurry to distance itself from both the partially ‘Manhattanised’ and richly layered complexity of Old Lagos Island, the colonial and post colonial residential districts of Ikoyi, Victoria Island and Lekki, collectively identified as ‘The Island’ and the bulk of the citys’ urban footprint in Ikeja, Surulere, Apapa, Agege and Badagry to the west all forming ‘The Mainland’. Simplistically this geography of separation defines the Lagosians’ perception of the city; The ‘Mainland’ denotes a congested low rise urban sprawl interjected with pockets of affluence and inversely, the ‘Island’ an affluent residential and commercial patchwork interlaced with incidents of poverty to which the socially mobile Lagos resident aspires to. Of course vanity isn’t the only driver in this aspiration, a concentration of white collar employment opportunities in Victoria Island and Old Lagos Island where 95% of Nigerian Banks are headquartered, better quality infrastructure and services and the Apapa and Tin Can Island port complex. This predominantly eastward growth interestingly seems to be the preferred destination for major private and public investment, which one might argue confirms the duality of the city and serves to harden ‘separatedness’ of the city; the polarity of place. However, it is also the historical imprint on the city, particularly the global trade interfaces, pre-colonial, colonial and post colonial that conspires to shape this urban geography and consolidate its position as Nigerias prime commercial city. The strip of former colonial trading houses, wharves which have mutated into the high rise skyline sit in contrast to the almost medieval low rise warren of the old city in northwest of Lagos Island. A cosmopolitan infusion of global influences; mongrel renaissance architecture from Brazilian freed slaves, the tropical colonial buildings of Empire and the tropical modernism of the post colonial state combine define a particular kind of ‘cityness’ that defines the great colonial port cities of Empire. The appropriated spaces of the islands public realm and the socio-economic processes which define such appropriations seem to have prevailed from the nineteenth to the twenty first century.

The image of Lagos is incomplete without rendering its roads and street. This vast modernist network of high speed expressways, elevated concrete bridges and asphalt surfaces defines the contested public realm beyond the concrete walls of the affluent enclaves and the intense ‘market front’ threshold conditions of the less affluent districts. Otto Koeningsbergers vision of pristine expressways with fast moving cars sketched out in the early 1960’s, threaded these linear elements through the city, which in his words;

‘The axial Motorway will be the artery of transport for Metropolitan Lagos. It will bring Agege on the north, as well as huge areas to the east of Victoria Island, to within 30 minutes drive to downtown Lagos. Developments will take place alongside, and to the north and eats of its extremities. Lagos will thus be not a circular but L – shaped metropolis with Lagos Island in the centre at the bend on the south west corner.’ 3

This anticipated flow of traffic in the capital city of the newly independent Nigeria, in a sense serving to define its aspirations to modernity, which as the site of the ‘Other’ falls into the trap of never quite being like or achieving the successes of the original. As Jennifer Robinson reminds us that;

‘The locatedness of the original concept of modernity and the hegemonic position of Western urban experiences in framing intellectual fantasies of city life has left cities in poorer countries, in former colonies, or in areas outside of western culture, to be apprehended through a static, non-dialectical lens of categorisation and other [non-western, African, Third World].’ 4

Proposed view of a typical avenue in the new development, complete with canal. Image courtesy of Lagos State Government

These linear urban spaces which the teeming and mainly economically excluded population have staked a claim on as their places of business have defined the iconography of Lagos proliferated by the photography of Edgar Cleinje in Mutations. The extreme concentration of people and vehicles at the Oshodi intersection with the sea of yellow of the ubiquitous Molue5 and Danfo buses and the overlay of informal trading over the railway searing into global consciousness the ‘marketspace’ of the city and rendering the aspired pristine modernity of Koeningsbergers transport masterplan redundant in a treacle of informal trading activity which accounts for 70 per cent of the citys’ economic activity.

It could be speculated that the top down grand urban visions for the city somehow seem to exclude the realities of the typical Lagosians’ existence; projections for the city repeatedly hinge future plans on quasi utopian ideas of an economically and therefore socially re-engineered society. If one subscribes to the primacy of conventional urban thought that no doubt precludes the African Urban condition, i.e. that of a truncated or incomplete modernity6 then one automatically has to query the repeatedly formulaic and mimetic approach adopted by successive administrators in the city which have yet to fully extract and exploit the potential of the city and improve the quality of life for its citizens.

The Lagos Mega City vision seems to hinge its actual delivery on a Neoliberalised economic ideal that effectively privatizes swathes of the city; from the proposed new financial district of Eko Atlantic City, the 16,000 hectare SEZ of Lekki Free Trade Zone and the controversial and contested Lekki Toll Road. The lack of government investment partly due to the economic truncation of the SAP era has implied an increase in the scale of current investment requirements that are considerably beyond the capabilities of the state, thereby forcing a marriage with the private sector for the provision of urban infrastructure. The private sector unfortunately isn’t altruistic and can therefore set the terms for participation in the business of the state and cherry pick the more profitable projects and initiatives. In the frontier capitalist space that is Nigeria, the more unpleasant extremes of capitalism may be magnified with the danger that the bulk of Lagos’ citizenry may be shortchanged and excluded from the benefits of this new urban vision.

The questions that instinctively linger are how the ‘Advanced Producer Services’ and Industrial Activities’ that no doubt will be housed in the economic enclaves being produced will include and benefit the larger proportion of Lagos residents?, how the selective provision of basic infrastructure and municipal services for a minute proportion of the population will sit with the millions of decent citizens of Lagos?, is there certainty that a trickle down of benefits will lift the economically deprived? Is the government further hardening the spatial and economic exclusions that currently define the city and unwittingly providing the material for the foreign writer looking for further confirmation of the city’s reputation? And is there a civic memory in the citizenry that informs a basic understanding of their rights to basic and decent municipal services?. These issues I feel should inform the dialogue between the citizen and state in Nigerias

Urban growth of Lagos and environs from 1850 projected to 2035. Image courtesy of bukka.org

Skyscraper in the proposed financial district. Image courtesy of Lagos State Government

most populous city. In short, there is an urgent need to enrichen, enliven and establish a broader critical debate about the future of the city which is wholly inclusive as the city belongs not just to the elite but to all it’s dwellers. The urban discourse on Lagos must include the complex granularity and shades of the grey rather than the convenience of black and white polarities. It is here the case for viewing the city and its underlying process first as ‘Ordinary’ becomes critical with a view to inflecting the current discourse to accept and include a pervasive reality that simply will not disappear under ‘Beautification’ projects, aggressive enforcement to change ingrained societal norms and imported utopian visions. There is the place for a ‘top down’ as well as a place for a ‘bottom up’, the engaging of the citizen and the collective interests; spatial economic and social must inform how the Lagos administrators think. A latency of potential is not being engaged with rigorously enough; the rulers seem to know what’s best for the citizens without consulting and debating the possibilities for the city.

Lagos for all its complexities, contradictions, paradoxes, intriguing aspirations to modernity and its sheer size I suggest could be better thought of as first an ‘Ordinary City’, rather than some aberration of the urban by a ‘not quite with it Other’.

Borrowing this phrase from Jennifer Robinsons similarly titled book ‘Ordinary Cities – Between Modernity and Development’, this position therefore seeks to inhabit the ‘shades of grey zone’ of reality that constitute cities globally rather than the simplistic extremes of either ‘Global /World City’ aspirations or poverty alleviation as the key drivers for urban development.

1) AbdouMaliq Simone writes about the ‘incomplete’ nature of African Cities when conventional notions of urbanity are juxtaposed on these cities. Notions in his words which revolve around ‘social division of labor and the consolidation of inviduation..’ People as Infastructure: Intersecting Fragments in Johannesburg; Public Culture 16(3) pg 407-429. Duke University Press 2004

2) Report of the Presidential Committee on the redevelopment of the Lagos Megacity Region 2006

3) Metropolitan Lagos, Otto Koenigsberger, Charles Abrams et al, United Nations Programme of Technical Assistance 1964

4) Ordinary Cities; Between Modernity and Development; Jennifer Robinson; Routledge 2006

5) Molue; Local name for the large privately operated buses which form the bulk of the cities public transport system

6) See note 1

Satellite image of Lagos showing conurbation in violet. Image courtesy of Google Maps

‘Lagos Imagined’: Future VisionsDesigns by up and coming students and visionaries

Lagos is a supremely visual and complex city. It immediately throws up questions and conundrums to those wishing to ascertain its inner workings; and to those who have more than a passing interest in the place, the more one looks at it, the greater the complexity one unravels. Here we show a small selection of visionary projects by the up and coming generation of designers.

James George, ‘8 Bridge’.

James George, ‘ToothPix megablocks’

Projects

James GeorgeHubCT Technologies

Following his studies at Ahmadu Bello University, James formed HubCT Technologies, an architectural practice whose stated aim is to ‘redefine the parameters of Nigerian architecture’. Here are three of his visionary projects for Lagos.

James George, ‘Ortho Block’.

M.T.A MarketNkiru Mokwe

Nkiru studied first at the Bartlett, then at the Rice School of Architecture in Texas. Her work speculates on the future of public space in cities and her future histories address issues of hyper density, congestion and scale in the growing megapolis. Her MTA Market project utilises the technology of ‘speed curvature’, currently implemented in modern motor-way design, to engineer a built connection between the territory of the motorcar and the informal motor-way occupation of the street trader and ubiquitous Lagos hawkers.

M.T.A Market, 5mph area.

M.T.A Market section.

Slum VeniceIsi Etomi

Isi studied at the University of Kent at Canterbury, and now works with James Cubitt in Lagos. Her ‘slum_venice’ project asks how architecture can ameliorate present conditions in Makoko without massive infrastructural development and the displacement of the 30,000 people who live there and working with the existing ecology.

Aerial view of dwellings showing how they attach themselves to walkways which provide amenities.

Momentary Hydrological CombatTosin Oshinowo

After studying at the Bartlett, Tosin now works at James Cubitt in Lagos. Her project, ‘Momentary Hydrological Combat’ seeks to create a low-cost sustainable colonisable surface in the context of unpredictable hydrological conditions.

Plan view of development project scheme.

Report

Lagos Island – Re-establishing the Memory of the CityPapa Omotayo

Lagos Island is Lagos, is Eko, the traditional term for the city. Its birthplace, its heart, its pulse, the purveyor of its layered history. Lagos Island is the roots and bark of a tree that continues to spread.

From the conquering of the Bini and the coronations and installation of its King, to present day, the ongoing metamorphosis of the area, from where a King’s palace still stands, originally built on a pepper farm, to what is now a sprawling dense urban centre, will always retain core relevance in a city that is expanding further afield to newer ‘green sites’.

The Lagos Island, which is home to what is believed to be over 2 million people and over 500,000 businesses, is more than just a market, more than just an abandoned commercial centre or a place bottled necked by pedestrians, traders and area boys. It is a place that is trying to regain its rightful place in the city, where ‘new’ is deemed better. In battling this perception, through a drive for regeneration, re-invention and a growing social political economical realisation, Lagos Island has deep reservoirs of untapped potential that is buttressed by the headquartering of 90% of Nigeria’s major corporations within its boundaries.

Recent experiments in power generation and sustainability are using Lagos Island as a template for what is possible in Lagos and the wider nation. LIMGE (Lagos Island Millennium Group on the Environment) are aiming to create a connected business

community, through integrated technology, security, CCTV – an online portal linking business and individuals working in the area. They are also raising funds to update critical services and infrastructure, all supported by major businesses within the area, who see Lagos island as part of their heritage.

Lagos Island has had many transformations and modifications, throughout it’s history, From a trading slave port to a Portuguese merchant enclave. Ulsheimer, one of the first to give westerners a first account of Lagos, documented the transformation of Lagos from fishing camp to a trading centre, and from an autonomous settlement to a Benin tributary. Lagos Lagoon was known to European traders by 1485, when it first appeared on maps, but the extents of Eko, Lagos, were not included. That came later as the city grew and migrants made it their home.

The dusk of slavery in the mid to late nineteenth century brought with it returnee slaves, looking to reclaim their history and identity. The footprints, skills and craftsmanship of the returnee slaves can be seen, physically, throughout some of the more ornate architectural buildings, still standing that sparsely litter the area of Lagos Island known as the Brazilian quarter.

What is left of the buildings along, Kakawa, Bamgbose and nearby streets are once again starting to regain recognition and become attractions, largely due in part to organised guided walks by Legacy; A historical conservation society that is raising awareness to preserve historical buildings

Dense urban grain of Lagos Island. Image courtesy of bukka.org

and site throughout Lagos Island and Nigeria. The walk allows me to think back to a time when Campos Square, a historical place for early settlers, played host to states men and heads of state; a platform to address the public and the wider nation in a simple town square setting.

Those same heads of state and with economic prosperity, the new heads of industry, who also studied at the prestigious Kings College, established in 1909; and also prayed at the Our Saviour’s Anglican Church, which was built in 1920 or the Shitta Mosque built in 1894, knew the importance of Lagos Island as a lynch pin to the wider city and indeed the wider country, both culturally and economically. Stories of ‘Isale Eko’(which literally means bottom), downtown Lagos Island, filled my childhood, as my aunt, rehashed stories of life, art, business and revelry in downtown Lagos island.

They also acknowledged the varying layers, influences and multi-culturalism that has always existed in Lagos Island. Along with the coming together of various Nigerian ethnical communities, the Shitta Mosque itself, has a strong Senegalese influence and the original patron, is testament to Lagos Island’s many layers.

Post Independence; flanked by the Lagoon and Marina (Lagos harbour connecting to Porto Nova Creek), Lagos Island grew and hemmed by 3 districts, cradled by a ring road, running from Eko Bridge to Third Mainland Bridge. Firstly; the commercial centre that runs North-West to South-East along Marina and Broad Street; secondly; backing the commercial centre North-Easterly by the civic and old merchant areas of Bambose, Igbosere (the Law Courts), Tafawa Balewa Square (the old race course) and thirdly North towards the Oba’s palace and more mixed used and residential areas.

This also represents a clear physical and density shift, from high rise and high density, to low rise and sprawling malaise with a clear hierarchy of pedestrian and vehicular movement as you move back from Marina. One feels the sense as you move further into Lagos Island, how the area was truly intended, pedestrian, dense and communal.

The recent surge in the creation of public and green spaces along the Marina, via Linear Park and the new Freedom Park, at the site of the old Lagos Island Prison, is a re-admission of the part public and communal spaces have always been central to any plan of Lagos Island. Though often compared in terms of its topography and setting, Lagos Island is no Manhattan. Yet it still remains the only part of Lagos that the pedestrian feels welcome, more the Soho districts of London and New York than the rest of Lagos. There are civic relationships between citizen and government,

between commerce and culture, between office and home.

The recent shift or rather demise, from the 1980’s in its status as the commercial centre, firstly to the expansion of Victoria Island extension which was usurped from a zoned residential area, to core commercial district. Victoria Island lacks the density and urban topography of Lagos Island. Initially it appeared to allow for seemingly better infrastructure and ease of operation, but now is mostly stuck in traffic paralysis. Walking in Victoria Island is possible, but lacks the close urban organisation of Lagos Island, where everything seems at your corner. Now as the commercial centre looks to move again to the new Eko Atlantic City. It isn’t the end for Lagos Island, rather a new opportunity to revive and engage in its flexibility, identity and reinvent the area using has always been there. Lagos Island is an uncompromising and multi-dimensional layered core-centre that epitomises the complexities, contradictions, creativeness and cultural dynamism of the city as a whole; the city’s’ memory in essence.

What is a worry at present is what seems to be prevalent at present in Lagos Island, the reinvention of Tafawa Balewa Square, once a great race course arena and public space – into a shopping complex, the destruction of the art deco Onikan public pool I favour of a commercial complex, more and more shopping centres, which seems to irk both resident and the urban sprawl itself; once again the profit motivated developer threatens. One pie eyed scheme after another, all failing to take flight or resonate.

The prize winning Nigerian author, Chinua Achebe’s once said, ‘One of the truest tests of integrity is its blunt refusal to be compromised.’ Lagos Island refuses to be compromised, partly because it holds the integrity and history of all Lagosians.

Aerial view of Lagos Island with Third Mainland Bridge.

Aerial view of Broad Street, Lagos Island.

Delft University of TechnologyDe Twee Snoeken Automatisering

FBW Architectenbkvdl

Dioraphte Foundation

ArchiAfrikaP.O. box 14174

3508 SG Utrecht Netherlands

tel +31 (0)30 223 23 20 fax +31 (0)30 251 82 78

www.archiafrika.org

ColofonText

Design

Editing

TranslationAnne-Marie van den Nieuwenhof-Damishimiro FONDATION SHIMIRO, Pointe-Noire, Congo

Supported byArchiAfrika receives support from the following institutes and

organisations:Stichting Doen

Agenda

4 - 10 October 2010Zamani Exhibition of African Cultural Heritage Sites

(South Africa)

13 - 14 October 2010The International Social Housing Summit

(The Netherlands)

15 October 2010Deadline Entries Blueprints of Paradise Competition

27 October 2010 ‘Modern Architecture in Africa’ book launch &

talk by Antoni Folkers (U.S.A)

19 November 2010‘World Day’

Goudappel Coffeng & Saxion University of Applied Sciences (The Netherlands)

29 November - 3 December 2010GEO Tunis 2010 (Tunisia)

4 - 11 December 2010The Salon Urbain de Douala [SUD]

(Cameroun)

23 March 2011Deadline Entries Holcim Awards

The Architecture of Demas NwokoA Review by Antoni S Folkers

Demas Nwoko calls himself an ‘artist-designer’ and a ‘master builder’, not an architect. In fact, he did not follow architectural education, but opted for the arts instead. During his studies, he became member of the ‘Zaria rebels’, a group of young artists seeking for new directions in the visual and performing arts in Nigeria. From theatre and sculpture he moved to architecture, and his unconventional approach to the profession became apparent right from the start.

To read the full review by Antoni S Folkers:http://www.archiafrika.org/en/node/1230

The architecture of Demas NwokoJohn Godwin and Gilian HopwoodFarafina, Lagos 2007ISBN 978-978-068-843-9

TextBerend van der LansGodson EgboGiles OmeziKaye WhitemanPapa OmotayoAntoni Folkers

DesignBukkaRachel Stella Jenkins

EditingBerend van der LansBukka

TranslationAnne-Marie van den Nieuwenhof-Damishi-miroFONDATION SHIMIRO, Pointe-Noire, CongoCélia Tchengang

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