Lagos

Lagos HOW IT WORKS synopsis

Rem Koolhaas Harvard Project on the City Edgar Cleijne 2x4 edited by Ademide Adelusi-Adeluyi Talia Dorsey

Lagos is not a city but a syndrome.

© OMA/AMO 2007

In the mid-nineties of the 20th century, the urban

condescending disbelief –whether in Singapore,

phenomena that were raging like brush fires on

‘Disneyland with the death penalty’1; China, ‘[await-

the so-called periphery were perceived in the inner

ing] a cultural desert beyond an economic oasis’2;

sanctums of western civilization as aberrations,

or Dubai, ‘Walt Disney meets Albert Speer’3. The

as deviations from the norm. After a 20th century

inability to understand the city as it has reinvented

marathon of modernization and destruction, the

itself – at the sites of unprecedented urban growth

West’s was a conversation language of contextual-

– perpetuated the Western model of the city, and

ism and gentrification, preoccupied with preserva-

found all other versions wanting.

tion, repair and maintenance. The production of new urban substance could be processed only through

Rem Koolhaas, 1997

1. William Gibson, “Disneyland with the Death Penalty”, Wired, Sept/Oct 1993.

2. “The Flowers of Civilization Blossom Everywhere” Donagguon Yearbook, 1994 3. “Yet the future that he is builing in Dubai ­- to the applause of billionaires and transnational corporations everywhere - looks like nothing so much as a nightmare of the past: Walt Disney meets Albert Speer on the shores of Araby.”

- Mike Davis, New Left Review, 2006.

A to Z world [composite world of Quality Control, GDP Growth, Suicide Rates, Repression, Prisoners, Illiteracy, Military expenditure, Average Age]

By superimposing almost any conceivable statistical metrics- the world divides in two with disturbing consistency. The developed and the developing, the A and the Z.

Perhaps poverty is a form of involuntary patience; when the effort of realization is extreme, the investment so disproportionate, ‘failure’ becomes relative, if not unthinkable... endless strategies of improvisation, either casual improvements or adjustments to new dysfunctionalities, postpone the moment of reckoning indefinitely...

World Metropolises [comparative location of world metropolises a the turn of the 20th century (left) and the 21st century (right)]

Within the last century the center of global urban mass has shifted dramatically to the developing world.

Lagos: How It Works is the final instalment of

but rather by the assertion that the notion of the city

The project has been underway for over ten years

The long wait also allowed us to mistrust our first...

the Harvard Project on the City, a series of inter-con-

itself has changed and that the words and values

- an outrageous amount of time. The advantage of

and second and third, impulses.

nected efforts to document and interpret the effects

ingrained in architectural discourse are painfully

its long gestation however, has been the capture

of globalization on the changing nature of the city.

inadequate in their capacity to describe or analyze

of an evolution, not a freeze frame. It enabled us to

The work is not inspired by the need to discover

their ostensible subject – the city – in all its manifes-

document incremental but significant changes that

ever more exotic, violent, or extreme urban thrills,

tations.

cumulatively, came to represent drastic change.

Rem Koolhaas, 2000

June 1999.

fric-tion zone (frĭk’shən zōn)

As if for the most convenient display,

Jankara Market © Edgar Cleijne 1999

the “drama” of Lagos unfolds along

The friction zone is the sum of accessible experience (the

the road. On both sides plays a perma-

marginal and the unformed). In Lagos maybe it occupies 1/3

nent scroll – when the traffic stops it

of the city. The entire population uses it, or is condemned to

turns into an [unclear] still – that

its use. It contains, informally, agriculture, manufacture, re-

seems to give the activities of the

pair, transport, culture, religion, education, (and connects) it

city unusually transparent exposure.

absorbs, distributes, and evacuates from any point of entry,

The scroll contains scenes of making,

any amount of people and goods intent to be part of Lagos’s

dismantling, selling and buying – a

circulation. It educates, emancipates. It is a zone of first and

frenzied multiplication of transac-

last opportunities. You can stay in it, drown in it, visit it in

tions – in an order that alternates

your terrors. It constantly changes character, but remains

between burning, smoldering, tempo-

structurally the same: it exists in the side, above and below

rary, plowing, scraping, displaying,

each piece of infrastructure, in the marginal zones between

growing. Both the straight vertical

large inert complexes and in the formless heaps and dumps

and the straight horizontal are ab-

where the city performs (organizes) its erratic metabolism...

sent. The scroll is inhabited by all

And that led me to describe our first hypothesis of

and all the sections that are provisional... It is inhabited by

ages. They all seem to move, in a per-

what the city of Lagos was. We called it the friction

10 million people... 800,000 cars, cows, sheep, goat!s, and

manent churning.

zone.

very vigorous rats.

Observations © Rem Koolhaas 1999

First Mainland Bridge

Oshodi

Š Edgar Cleijne 1999

Š Edgar Cleijne 2001

Lagos was basically, and practically, coinciding with

In these forms there is a lot of self organization.

and aware that there was something much more

been only seeing this zone and not this other Lagos

a number of major motorways. On either side and of

And so our first impulse was that poverty, abandon-

complex going on,

- a much less improvised, much less scared Lagos‌

varying depth, there was a zone where the drama

ment, and systems of law, generated a very intricate

of the city was acted out. It was a zone of incredible

self-organizing machine. Somehow against odds

It was only when we were able to hire a helicopter,

frictions, visible frictions between different catego-

and entirely dependent upon the ingenuity of every

the helicopter of the president, that we were able to

ries of inhabitants.

human involved. Later I became more intrigued

go beyond the foreground and realize that we had

and, that really our insistence on the apparently informal was premature, if not mistaken.

We saw the largest mass of people we had ever

(left)

Lagos Island, infrastructure and housing

(left)

National Theatre

© Edgar Cleijne 2001

© Edgar Cleijne 2001 (right)

Lagos Central Business District

(right)

Trade Fair Complex

© Edgar Cleijne 2001

© Edgar Cleijne 2001

seen congregating in one place. Focused on people,

that turned Lagos into a finely calibrated organiza-

The ubiquity of the infrastructural contribution,

voluntary mutual entanglement that now makes it

structures, organizing markets, we became aware

tion, but also the infrastructure built during an era of

whatever value of its outcome(s), implies a curiously

impossible, but also strongly misleading, to sepa-

that the density of these people actually enabled

extreme optimism about the future of Nigeria and the

hybrid indivisible, post-colonial condition precisely

rate/disentangle these parties.

a dysfunctional section of infrastructure and that

ability of modern thinking to affect urban systems in

after independence. Modernization accelerates,

Lagos was a much more complex system than we

a deliberate way.

outside experts are summoned to articulate new

Through this intimate intertwining, the history of

political social and cultural visions and engage in a

cities like Lagos also belongs to the West. In fact,

had initially thought. It wasn’t simply abandonment

Rem Koolhaas 2004

Maybe ‘independence’ is a style, a specific subheading of a second ‘international style’ that articulated a global 60s euphoria – a semantic platform that enabled Africans to rethink themselves and others to rethink Africa…within a single semantic system of an emerging global culture, rather than the apartheid – the disconnect – imposed from the seventies, on Africa through the intransigence of the post colonial discourse, which in fact may have been the beginning of its decline.

Alcan Pavilion Nigeria Exhibition, Lagos, 1960 © R. Buckminster Fuller papers

categorically, and at an even more massive scale in

Rockefeller. They (re)made the city at a pace and on

times between 1958 and 1965) and McLuhan

hygiene and the orders of colonial life). An elaborate

the 70s, the best brains of the visionary 60s were to

a scale that is comparable to the current transforma-

espoused the incumbent superiority of ‘tribal man’

collection of systems and structures was proposed

a greater or lesser extent involved in the creation of

tion of China – a pace that accelerated in the 70s,

in the face of technological change, massive stud-

to confront its immediate issues and channel its

modern Lagos, summoned by government agen-

when oil money fuelled the transformation spree.

ies, master plans, and UN reports were effected to

explosive expansion in the future.

cies, sent by international institutions such as the UN, supported by Foundations such as the Ford and

examine at the overall condition of Lagos (then only While Fuller brought his ideas (visiting Africa 21

700. 000 large, with an infrastructure based on basic

Lagos was drastically transformed by Julius Berger,

(left)

National Theatre, 1976

(top left)

Julius Berger in Lagos the first team © Julius Berger

(centre left)

Trade Fair Complex Interior 1978

(bottom left)

© Zoran Bojovic 1978

Lagos landfill

early sketches © Julius Berger

(centre right)

Trade Fair Complex Masterplan 1972

(right)

© Energoprojekt 1972

Lagos Island with Berger landifills and transportation infrastructure © Edgar Cleijne 2001

(right)

Trade Fair Complex Opening Day 1978 © Zoran Bojovic 1978

a West German company that imagined radical

with the mainland and proposed huge extensions of

‘Independence’ also offered an ironic pretext of soli-

speculative freedom, to supply Africa with compel-

transformations of Lagos Island, projecting enor-

the business core, using these territories for infra-

darity/identification inside the otherwise enslaved/

ling emblems/icons of an independence that they,

mous landfills created and able to receive the infra-

structural interventions and traffic improvements of

unfree territories of communism. The regime’s

for the moment, had lost. Where, in the first wave of

structure of the modern age.

unusual complexity and intricacy, that collectively

wholesale rhetorical identification enabled huge

modernism, abstract painting was injected with an

produced an urban vernacular premised on contem-

architectural state bureaucracies, who, for once

invigorating dose of so-called primitivism, now the

porary infrastructure as integral to African life.

under communism, could work with exceptional

depleted language of modernism received an infu-

The firm built the bridges that connect Lagos island

sion of totemic energy, in symmetrical compositions

Lagos Traffice Study Wilbur Smith, 1962 Š Wilbur Smith 1962

- based on shields, masks, the entire repertoire of

Through this research we recognized the modern

African obviousness - even the elongated propor-

blueprint of Lagos. A device which enables us to

tions of the idealized black body. The organism of

begin understanding the city through what currently

second hand metabolism intersected with synthetic

remains of the blueprint, how it’s used in micro

tribal/warrior aesthetics, to produce a compelling

and macro detail, and how it underpins the equally

repertoire of post-colonial celebration produced by

ingenious, unfolding systemic blueprint of the city

communist acronyms.

dwellers.

Lagos Traffice Study Harvard Project on the City, 2002.