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LAG style

In posting a bunch of my pics from Lagos recently, I struggled with the idea of how to present them, to contextualise these soundless, smellless, untouchable images to more effectively convey the “Lagos” experience, as varied as that might be.

I wanted to give someone who has never been there an idea of what it would be to be invisible and walking around. I've always thought things are more interesting in these kinds of places, when your effect on the surroundings are kept to a minimum. I mean its pretty difficult to observe and appreciate the myriad human dramas unfolding before you, if your “Otherness” changes the natural stability of the environment you are observing.

Here is the introduction to an architectural case study of Lagos from Mutations. This intro has stuck with me, not only for its culturally unladen approach, but its spot on identification of the “anguish” I've felt about the dearth of infrastructure and amenities that spawn flavours of innovation and development but also my failure to recognize the working alternative systems in that gap.

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 near-complete absence of those infrastructures, systems, organizations, 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, its still -- for lack of a better word -- a city; and one that works.

Rapidly expanding, transforming, and perfecting, the Lagos urban condition allows for the survival of up to fifteen million people.

Anguish over its shortcomings in traditional urban systems obscures the reasons for the continued, exuberant existence of Lagos and other megacities like it. These shortcomings have generated ingenious, critical alternative systems, which demand a redefinition of ideas such as carrying capacity, stability, and even order, canonical concepts in the fields of urban planning and related social sciences. The operation of the Lagos megalopolis illustrates the large-scale efficacy of systems and agents considered marginal, liminal, informal, or illegal according to traditional understandings of the city.

This project is as much a study of Lagos as it is a study of more radical possibilities in the discipline of urban planning, and a proposal of new ways to examine the modern city. While conditions identified in Lagos are extreme cases, such extremity is generally a very rational response to a dysfunctional scenario.

The material logic of Lagos in convincing.

We are resisting the notion that Lagos represents an African city en route to becoming modern. Or, in a more politically correct idiom, that it is becoming modern in a valid, “African” way. Rather, we think it possible to argue that Lagos represents a developed, extreme, paradigmatic case-study of a city at the forefront of globalizing modernity.

This is to say that Lagos is not catching up with us. Rather we may be catching up with Lagos.

The African city forces the reconceptualization of the city itself. The fact that many of the trends of modern, Western cities can seen in hyperbolic guise in Lagos suggests that to write about the African city is to write about the terminal condition of Chicago, London or Los Angeles. It is to examine the city elsewhere, in the developing world. It is to reconsider the modern city and to suggest a paradigm for its future.

In short, we would argue, it is to do away with the inherited notion of “city” once and for all. - Mutations, { Harvard Project on the City }, page 652-653

Here are a handful of scanned images from this case study; pardon the shoddy scan-job, wielding this glossy 800 page brick wasn't particularly obvious.

Thursday, May 13 2004 - 22:00
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