Open City Lagos
Total Page：16
File Type：pdf, Size：1020Kb
Contents Editorial............................................................................................ i 1.0 Governance/Participation .................. 1 2.0 Cultural Narratives, Urban Aesthetics ...... 49 1.1 Rethinking Governance to Bring About the “Good City”: 2.1 Rouge Flânerie: Cultural Takhawalu in Urban Extremes: The Case of Lagos Cape Town & Dakar by Fabienne Hoelzel ............................................................ 2 by Dr. Jenny Mbaye ...........................................................50 1.2 Incubate or die? Assessing the impacts of business 2.2 Negotiating & Narrating Urban Public Spaces as Forms support systems on women entrepreneurs in Lagos of Bordering Practices in Beirut by Dr. Temilade Sesan ......................................................12 by Dr. Mohamad Hafeda ..................................................58 1.3 Smarter Lagos: Using technology to foster inclusion, 2.3 Drawing Attention: Tracing Heritage & Interactions in the civic participation, service provision and social Brazilian Quarter of Lagos innovation by Nele Brönner & Prof. Frank Eckardt ..........................66 by Emeka Okoye .................................................................17 2.4 Monochrome Lagos: In Praise of Black & White 1.4 Lagos the Online City? Testing the waters with social by Oluwamuyiwa Logo .....................................................72 media as a tool for inclusion by Olamide Udoma ............................................................26 1.5 Pilots for Open City: The Case of Jakarta, Indonesia by Florian Heinzelmann & Daliana Suryawinata ....... 32 1.6 Being Berlin: A Tale of Two Cities by Lukas Feireiss ...............................................................42 3.0 Economic Opportunities/Real Life Stories ... 79 4.0 Migration/Spaces of Negotiation ... 101 3.1 On the Uses of Micro-Managing: Negotiating Access 4.1 The Cities of Sanctuary Movement: Building a culture for Waste-Pickers in New Delhi of hospitality for refugees and asylum seekers by Bharati Chaturvedi .......................................................80 by Emeritus Professor Carole Rakodi .........................102 3.2 Moving ahead when the chips are down: Livelihood 4.2 What the rest of Accra can learn from Jamestown insecurities of street food businesses by Victoria Okoye .............................................................. 112 by Dr. Temilade Sesan ......................................................87 4.3 Absorbing the Migrant: Modern Realities of IDP 3.3 Squatting to survive: experiences in Lagos Women traders at the margins of Ajah market by Cheta Nwanze ..............................................................122 by Dr. Temilade Sesan ......................................................92 4.4 Lagos’ informal settlements as learning centers for 3.4 What Jane Jacobs saw: The Unrehearsed innovation, resilience and inclusion: Community-led Choreography of Urban Dwellers in Lagos solutions to citywide challenges by Omolara Adenugba ......................................................95 by Megan Chapman & Andrew Maki ............................136 Editorial – Open City Lagos Cities stand out as the most open format of human settlements in recorded history. Their propensity for absorption lends them an infrastructural complexity, such that they are able to accommodate diverse social identities, spatial densities, as well as the potential for political mobilisation and economies of scale. Yet despite their reputation and persisting allure, cities are neither intrinsically inclusive nor democratic. Affordability, work permits and more systemic or locational factors such as transport connectivity or gender perceptions come into play in determining who has access to the city, for how long and on what terms. Investment in infrastructure and economic policies directed to encourage growth can create difficulties for smaller players who struggle to sustain their livelihoods in an increasingly global marketplace. Environmental hazards often disproportionally affect the poor and other disadvantaged groups who tend to cluster in sub-standard housing in the under-serviced margins and the blackholes of the city. In short, admittance to the city is not synonymous with equal provision of the cushions and benefits of urbanisation. And nowhere is this more blatant than in cities of the South, where “the legacy of an incomplete modernity” coupled with limited municipal capacities and all the challenges that 21st century brings have typified cities marked by deficits in affordable housing, transport and road infrastructure, electricity, and facing severe challenges in education, healthcare and more. This is the typical narrative of the African city – an inventory of urban ills, more recently marked by an eager optimism that earmarks sites of innovation and investment. Take the example of Lagos: only a few years ago, Lagos was characterized as a chaotic, dysfunctional city. Still, some researchers argued that the seeming dysfunction had its own internal mechanisms maintaining an interethnic, interreligious and social equilibrium. Despite the apparent chaos - mainly due to infrastructural neglect – strong neighborhood communities existed where young and old, rich and poor, Muslims and Christians and the diverse ethnic and West African identities lived closely together supporting and benefitting from each other. As a city, Lagos has gone through multiple face-changing mandates, each alluding to the mode and extent of its openness. Broadly speaking, colonial strategies were quite straightforward. Governance was centered on economic expansion with an emphasis placed on industry, whilst urban development was ostensibly motivated by the wish to enforce sanitation, prevent environmental mishaps and limit the spread of communicable diseases such as typhoid and malaria in preserved areas. Thus infrastructure provision concentrated on the development of roads, railways and ports strategic to trade – such as the Iddo railway terminus and the deepening of berthing docks at Apapa – with serious negligence of the local community. Few if any concerted attempts were made to plan the indigenous areas of the city. It was not until an outbreak of the Bubonic Plague in 1928, that the Lagos Executive Development Board (LEDB) was established and given extensive powers to undertake comprehensive improvement schemes within the city’s limits. Fast-forward through several decades of partially delivered master-planning and ad-hoc development against broad and pervasive informal city-making. 1999 saw the ushering in of a new style of urban governance, characterised by fiscal restructuring and resource mobilisation, an expanded portfolio of public-private partnerships, a concentration on spatial planning, as well as the prioritisation of service delivery in transportation, education and primary healthcare. Like other cities of the global South and emerging economies, Lagos has embraced model city approaches, welcomed new technologies and increasingly gears its fiscal planning towards private and foreign direct investment. The consequences are improved infrastructural standards, greater capital flows and new sectors of growth, which the fast-growing city does need. But it Editorial iii also means higher indices for exclusion and inequality in areas skewed against investment. Gated communities are being created for middle and high income class excluding the poor; low income jobs and housing are being destroyed to upgrade infrastructure; gigantic infrastructural projects destroy the fragile ecological systems along the Lagoon and coast. This risks deepening social and economic segregation of the populace due to dwindling resources and opportunities and could easily result in increased tension and conflict with tremendous negative impacts on its socio-economic development not only for the city, but also Nigeria and the whole West African region, already destabilized by climate stress, migration and terror movements. This risk is heightened by the increasing numbers of low income migrants coming to Lagos on a daily basis. How should Lagos city define its concept of openness in a changing environment? What does “openness” really mean for a city? In his curatorial statement for the 4th international IABR in 2009, ETH-Zurich Professor Kees Christiaanse defined the ’open city’ as “a place where different social groups co-exist, cultural diversity is present, differences in scale are visible, and urban innovation and probably economic development are taking place.” He goes on to note that the resulting effects of these intersections should have a largely positive effect before we can speak of a city as being “open”. It is a similar philosophy of urban space, community and development that Open City Lagos subscribes to, with adaptations made to align our definition with the conditions and priorities of Lagos and other cities in the global South. The ‘open city’ is not a place but a quality where players from different scales and sectors come together to foster growth that is diverse, equitable, creative, sustainable and inclusive. Its indicators are diverse - from migrants’ experience to questions of mobility and boundaries, the status of public health, access to housing and basic urban services, and the ability to influence policy or to participate in decision-making processes that affect one’s livelihood or well-being. Open City Lagos is a conversation enacted across Lagos and with other cities, with a focus on