Tarkwa Bay Food Hub

Many do not know the story of Tarkwa Bay, Lagos. The mahority of the people who lived in Tarkwa Bay have been forced out of their homes by the government over the last 20 years or so. The community as shrunken and there has been little empathy by the government to stop doing this to the community. Lagos has struggled with what to do with the poorer families within the city, where instead of having remorse and helping these struggling familes, they have kicked them out, making way for the rich to come in and take over. They are damaging familes, homes, and the wellbeing of its citizens and they have no choice in the matter.

Our project's intention is to bring some of that life back to Tarkwa Bay and give it something it needs to prosper. This was a large class project, where everyone chose a site on the map of Tarkwa Bay to design something they thought could have some significance to the island. Some chose to do a community center, residential communities, restaurants, auditoriums. I chose to do a food hub, again. This was the first project I did as a grad school student and I had just came off of designing the Chicago food hub, but I knew this was being designed with different intentions, purpose, and location. I felt very strongly about having the community gather and learn about food. What it takes to grow food, how it works, and how a site like this could help aid the community, not only for entertainment and leisure, but for learning and establishing themselves. The site that I chose over floods at certain times of year, where people basically just get around by boat. With this site, being able to let water flow in, creating a riverwalk here would allow every post to be a docking point for the people of Tarkwa Bay. Having designed a food hub already, little things like this is what I knew would set this apart from the other project and would help aid this community in a much different, possitive way.

Tarkwa Bay Food Hub

The design went under many different permutations over the course of the semester. From the begining of the semester, letting water flow into the site was a must, becasue of the way setting up bays and a place where water can flow when it does get over flooded would really help the community. The sites adjacent to mine all worked on similar projects so we started to incorporate new things into each of our own sites to combine it so that it made sense as a whole. The site next to the food hub shown in red was a 3d printed housing community that would directly benefit from the food hub because of proximity.

The design of the overal site included the food hub and a community just on the other side of the river that flows in. There use to be a large number of houses in this area where the communities are located, so it made sense to re-establish them here, but in a different way. The food hub also has a docking point for ships to come in and start a proper import/export route for the citizens of Tarkwa Bay. Relationships like this with other countries are what makes the world go around, so it was an important feature that needed to be added. The communities have private farming, as well as community farming on three islands as shown below. This is to allow the food hub to have a farther reach within the community and to really provide the necessary resources for this community to prosper. At the top of the site plan, there are a row of beachfront housing units, that could be used for tourism because it is one of the main money-making opportunities the people of Tarkwa Bay utilize to survive.

Tarkwa Bay is still a nice spot for tourism and does see a good amount of site traffic from tourism, so having something like this for the community to profit off of is nice to have.