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Negotiating Lagos: Viewing Lagos Wide & Close
Lagos Wide & Close: An Interactive Journey into an Exploding City. Rem Koolhaas and Bregtje van der Haak (The Netherlands, Submarine DVD, 2006).
Lagos, Nigeria, has been described in vivid terms, yet the city's teeming squalor is poorly captured by words. The commercial (and former political) capital of Africa's most populous country, Lagos is a sprawling urban concentration now encompassing some 15 million people, and growing rapidly. The city has few traffic lights or sidewalks, a faltering electricity grid that collapses for weeks at a stretch, little potable water, tenuous order, and a "public" transportation system cobbled together from private networks of locally-crafted buses and vans. Shanty settlements and cinderblock apartments give way to a patchwork of affluent estates. Violent crime is barely contained. A corrupt bureaucracy and venal police create daily travails for residents.
Nonetheless, amid hardships and disarray, a strong current of vitality runs though this metropolis. Nigeria's financial, professional, business, media, and cultural worlds are centered in Lagos, with links across West Africa and as far south as Cape Town. Contentious local politics resonate across the country. Nigeria's myriad ethnic and religious identities are found throughout the city's neighborhoods, usually managing to coexist, though periodically sparking tensions. Churches, mega-churches, mosques, and Pentecostal sanctuaries are ubiquitous. A raucous spirit of entrepreneurship is apparent: industrial outfits, small businesses, workshops, markets and stalls fill every available space (and many that would seem unavailable). Alongside such prosaic activities, a shadowy layer of trafficking, drugs, money-laundering, and organized violence is also a major part of life in Lagos.
The scale and dysfunction of Lagos have been greatly aggravated by oil. Lagos was a bustling if manageable colonial capital of a few hundred thousand people in 1960, when Nigeria attained independence from Britain. Migration from the rural areas swelled the urban population in the first decade after independence, but the petroleum boom of the 1970s created truly explosive growth, as state employment expanded, large-scale public works projects proliferated, the newly rich elite constructed grandiose houses, and industrial estates ringed the city. The lure of jobs, services, and opportunity attracted migrants from across the country and the region. Untrammeled growth overwhelmed urban infrastructure as traffic became increasingly congested, electricity failed, neighborhoods sprawled...