Contents

1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6.

Introduction What conditions in Lagos cause informal places to create? Uses and functions Theoretic relations Conclusion Literature

1. Introduction

The last decennia African cities encounter large problems with the reception of a high number rural-origin migrant. The most notorious example of urban growth in Africa has undoubtedly been Lagos, its most important commercial centre. The city has shot up in size since the 1960s. Lagos is growing at such an astonishing rate that by 2015 it is predicted to be the third largest city in the world, behind Mumbai and Tokyo. The city is divided into three islands adjacent to each other and the mainland. The vast majority of wealth in the city is concentrated on Ikoyi and Victoria Island, the upmarket islands, with their western-style shopping malls, entertainment complexes and multinationals. However, the bigger part of the city is reflecting a total different image of the city. Three-quarters of Lagos residents live in informal settlements and gain their incomes from informal economies. Lagos portrays the paradoxical characteristics of the contemporary African city being dysfunctional yet a dynamic urban form’ (Un-habitat, 2007). Next to these extreme and difficult situations, the aesthetics of informality; its multi-layer scenes of urban everyday life and living in-between, is lately infiltrating into contemporary design thinking. On the one hand, the appearances of informal urbanism are crudely condemned as a shameful blemish of modernization and invasion of public spaces, yet on the other hand, celebrated as an amazing collage of complex urbanism which expresses the true nature of city and denounces the rational self-righteousness of planning (Kang, 2009, p. 249). Learning from the informal city is an academic new trend to explore alternatives of noneradicative urban renewal/ urban design and urban studies. What used to be condemned as destroyed and ruptured, is given now fresh perspectives as spaces full of subtleties and possibilities. The main research question that I will try to answer with this paper derived form this development and is 'Why is the informal city a place of interest and inspiration for contemporary architects and urban designers? At first I'm going to look at the criteria that causes the realisation of those places. Secondly I will investigate there nature, uses and functions through the eyes of Rem Koolhaas, the famous dutch star-architect and thinker who was one of the first, in the context described above, to explore Lagos. He investigated the city for five years in order to find out 'how it works'. His research, findings and perspectives on

the city are documented in the form of a documentary 'Lagos Wide & Close' made by Bregtje van der Haak which I will use for this research. At last I will look for backgrounds and theories that underpin the interest of Koolhaas and other architects/urban-designers and thinkers in Lagos. The goal of this paper is to understand why those places are attractive and of an increasing interest, but also to highlight the danger and downside of this interest.

1. What conditions in Lagos cause informal places to create

As described in the introduction of this paper, recent scholars, academics and designers are interested in the multi-layered, overlapping and non linear patterns of the informal urban space. In this chapter I'm going to describe some important notions behind the creation of these conditions of the informal city. In Lagos and many more African cities the amount of newcomers that come to the city is so high, that successful urban planning lies !"#$%&'()"'*+,+!-.-(-"/'$0'()"'12%-*-,+.-(#'+%&' 3$4"5%1"%(6'7./$'-(/ formal economy is unable'($'1""('()"'&"1+%&'0$5'"1,.$#1"%(6' The economic benefits of globalization have largely bypassed Sub-Saharan Africa and its cities, as these cities have become increasingly side-lined from the prosperous sectors of the global economy. This has and continues to further worsen the unemployment problems. But migrants from the rural area's that come in large numbers to the city, hoping for a better future, can not passively watch their conditions deteriorate and are forced to create their own opportunities in housing and employment. They invent alternative ways of gaining access to land, housing, income, water and other basic services (Lindell, 2002, p. 9). They reinvent traditional socio-cultural practices in order to deal with the challenges of contemporary urban life and combine different social positions and multiple identities to access a wider range of opportunities in the diverse socio-economic environments of the city. They build their own social institutions and norms to regulate a variety of exchanges, lending daily life in the city a degree of predictability and security. Abdoumaliq Simone (2001, pp. 103), an important African scholar, describes that next to the uncertainty’s that already characterizes much of everyday urban life, also intensify through the state's arbitrary actions, in terms of how decisions are made, resources applied and formalities distributed (licenses, permits etc.). Many processes of city politics and administrations have become increasingly informalized. Formal institutions now exist simply as a context in which those wide range of informal business and activity's can be pursued. Thus, he argues, apart from the fact that those activities are necessary for the inhabitant to survive, it also causes that institutions to lose the base and capacity they might have had to facilitate a shared public interest. In this way the inhabitants get more and more depended on there own initiatives and there own social structures.

2. Uses and functions

In the documentary 'Lagos Wide and Close' which I will use as research material in this chapter, there are two specific conditions that take place on two different kind of locations in the city, that gain a lot of attention. Koolhaas uses those conditions as maine representatives of the city's complex, overlapping, non-linear systems. For that reason, it will use those spaces because they, the other way around, also represent what Koolhaas thinks that are important features of the city. I will explain the nature of these places and use Koolhaas perspective to describe the uses and functions of it.

City Dump

“A recycling plant, situated on an un-programmed area, that at first sight looks chaotic, but when the camera zooms in you see that people use the space to transform garbage into usable products in an incredibly organized way and that altogether they form a community that works very well in its self” (van her Haak, 2005)

The first important condition discussed in the documentary is an un-programmed space, left empty on the map, but used by the city's municipality and by its inhabitants on many different levels. It is the city's garbage dump. But also the place where 'scavengers' work. The city municipality dumps the the garbage without having any intentions of recycling it. The 'scavengers' make use out of this situation, by running through all the garbage in order to collect, order and sell re-usable materials. But not only do they work there, some of them also live there, and make their own houses out of materials found on the dump. And next to that a whole community of shops, mosques, cinema's and barbershops is built around it.

Immobile traffic-zones

“What was most characteristic about the city was that it was in it’s entirety an almost immobile condition, with very occasional movement, an incredible zone of vehicular and pedestrian circulation,

where the two were intermingled and where a system of go slow had the entire city in his grip.We started to discover that what seemed a completely random and kind of improvised world actually included a number of very elaborate organizational networks. And that some of the things that seemed to be at first sight tragic manifestations of a kind of degraded urban life, were actually intensely ‘emancipatory’ zones.” (van der Haak, 2005)

The second important condition highlighted by Koolhaas involves a place of another type of nature, which is like the dump also by the inhabitants used for private, commercial activities, but unlike the dump initially intended as public or as some urban-design theorist say about traffic networks, as a 'non-space'. The explosive growth of Lagos, has brought the city’s transportation infrastructure to a near-paralysis. Lagos’s infrastructure is being pushed to its limits, resulting in a large amount of endless traffic jams.Thus, Lagos with his entire web of highways, motorways and complex intersections, planned in the 70ths of the 20th century, when the city was experiencing an economic boom, actually doesn’t create movement at all. But again, like the city dump, these places continues to be functional in a totally different way than intended by the planners. A typical example is the popular Oshodi market where shop owners, hawkers, motorists and pedestrians compete for space. It is a place where roads and railway come together. Almost all free space around the cars, busses and trains, is used for selling and buying. Even the railway is filled with people, who will step a side when the train passes and immediately fill the space again when it’s gone. (Lecture Adeyemi, 2010) Again, the inhabitant make use out of the given situation which is this time that the city suffers from a lot of traffic congestion, and which allows the informal buyers and sellers the opportunity to create meeting and interaction zones on places where a lot of people are forced to pass by. :

Both these examples show that because of the existing dis-functionalities of the city and the absence of dominant rules and regulations, public space can be defined by the way the inhabitants use, instead of by the way it was planned. This bottom-up created public space is continuously being occupied or used in a temporal new way. When opportunity meets the absence of territoriality, hawkers, food merchants, mechanics, tailors, hairdressers and all kinds of entrepreneurs occupy the urban spaces, converting them into meeting, trading zones. In Lagos, opportunity and recycling go hand in hand. But both of these examples mostly show how Koolhaas image of the informal city is built up from. He points out in both situations that despite the chaotic looks and the problematic context, the level of organisation and function is

very high, and with this underlining the power of the on individuals based, self-organised networks on a urban scale. Koolhaas comments seem to result on the realization that a total state of freedom, can still make urban public space work.

3. Theoretic relations The previous chapter exposed how the 'image' of the informal public place, which captures the interest of contemporary urban-design theorist, is built up. In this chapter i'm going to continue on this 'image' trying to investigate where it derived from by looking at different western theories on public space that articulate the notion of freedom in public spaces. Since the beginning of the modern movement, meaning of the public sphere has been a main topic of debate in urban-design and architecture. The public sphere is constantly undergoing changes and as a consequence of the level of 'publicness' that continues to decrease, and the increasing level of diversification and privatization, the clear line between public and private is being argued (Avermeate, 2009, p. 45). One of the first contemporary visions on public space in favour of giving more freedom and possibilities to the people, was expressed by the spanish architect de Manuel Sola-Morales when he introduced the term collective space. This was during the debate on public domains in the 1990s when he wanted to put an end to the superiority of the public space. In an influential article (de Sola-Morales, 1992, p. 85) he posed that the classical dichotomy of public and private does not longer match urban reality and that maintaining the strict division between the two will therefore turn out contra productive, it will limit its usability. He stated that all spaces utilized by groups of people have a social significance, and that public and private spheres exist in different gradations. This he called the collective domain. Morales argued that collective spaces are far more functional then pure public spaces and that urbanizing the private is the core function of the public space. Collective space could either be generated by using private space as partly public, or the other way around; by using public space in a private matter. Adriaan Geuze takes the issue of freedom further by pointing out the importance of unprogrammed space. in his article 'Accelerating Darwin' written in the year 2000, Geuze describes un-programmed space as an area not fixed with a certain function. It does not serves any kind of design or planning motives, but in that way it will attract people to create there own function out of it. Because he claims:

“The pre-programmed space is one-dimensional. Human beings are demoted to the status of road users, recreationists, or shoppers. Their behavior is laid down. All the ingredients of the street scene

are geared to a clear and standardized use. Codes dictate behavior.” (Geuze, 2000 p.108)

In his revolutionary article 'Generic City' Koolhaas fantasizes about a new type of city. A city in which the formation of facilities is a dynamic process and which will continuous renewed itself.

“The Generic City is the city liberated from the captivity of the centre, from the straitjacket of identity. (…) If it gets too small, it expands. If it gets old, it self-destructs and renews. (…) it can produce a new identity every Monday morning” (Koolhaas, 1995, p. 63).

When now looking back at Koolhaas comments on the traffic zones in Lagos, some relations become clear.

“What was most characteristic about the city was that it was in it’s entirety an almost immobile condition, with very occasional movement, an incredible zone of vehicular and pedestrian circulation, where the two were intermingled and where a system of go slow had the entire city in his grip.We started to discover that what seemed a completely random and kind of improvised world actually included a number of very elaborate organizational networks. And that some of the things that seemed to be at first sight tragic manifestations of a kind of degraded urban life, were actually intensely ‘emancipatory’ zones” (van der Haak, 2005).

These three visions described above are clearly seen back in the characteristics of the informal city trough the eyes of Koolhaas. And it is therefor not unsurprisingly that modern contemporary theorist get inspired by the informal city. Even the most extreme fantasy's, as the conditions described in 'Generic City', occur. The informal city is collective, in the way that public space get privatized, it is un-programmed in the way that when opportunity arrives, the people take it over and use it in there own way, and the informal city is generic in the way that the people form their own centers, create their own architecture and these are constantly being renewed.

5.Conclusion Informal urbanism challenges architectural authorship, and control by expressing individualities needs in a collective mode. It invites all city inhabitants to participate in constructing social and productive networks. Informal urbanism unveils a mechanism of autonomous, organic city building from bottom up instead of implementations of imposed plans. Informal urbanism in Lagos could be seen as a extreme manifestation of visions and theories developed due to modernization and globalization in the western city. Because of this reason, these conditions of the informal city can sound exiting and interesting in the ears of architects and urban-designers. Like I wrote in the introduction; what used to be condemned as destroyed and ruptured, is given now fresh perspectives as spaces full of subtleties and possibilities. But Lagos and all other informal cities in development countries, are not a learning lab and are not a scientific experiment which can be addressed and explained in a pure abstract way. The architect or urban designer should keep in mind the causes of these conditions to be created as I described in chapter one. The informal city embodies the daily struggles of billions of people, a large numbers of urban residents no longer have access to either traditional or modern modalities of social reproduction, they come to rely of provisional actions, identities and social composition. It is all about those people and there stories, and there stories are connected to our stories. We must not undermine our responsibility to act humane and help to change it.

Literature Avermaete, T., Havik, K. (red.) (2009). Architectural Positions; Architecture, Modernity and the Public Sphere. Amsterdam, Sun Publishers.

Geuze, A. (2000). “Accelerating Darwin”, In: Avermaete, T., Havik, K. (red.) Architectural Positions; Architecture, Modernity and the Public Sphere. Amsterdam, Sun Publishers. p.101108. Kang, M. (2009). Informal Urbansim from inside-out; Internalizing Taipei Experiences of Informality. The 4th International Conference of the International Forum on Urbanism (2009) Amsterdam/Delft

Koolhaas, R. (1995). “Generic City”, In: Avermaete, T., Havik, K. (red.) Architectural Positions; Architecture, Modernity and the Public Sphere. Amsterdam, Sun Publishers. p.6385.

Lindell, I. (2002). Walking the Tight Rope;Informal Livelihoods and Social Networks in a West African City. Stockholm, Department of Human Geography Stockholm University. Simone, A. (2001) .Straddling the Divides: Remaking Associational Life in the Informal African City. International Journal of Urban and Regional Research - Volume 25, Number 1, March 2001, pp. 102-117 Simone, A. (2004). People as Infrastructure: Intersecting Fragments in Johannesburg Public Culture - Volume 16, Number 3, Fall 2004, pp. 407-429. Sola Morales, M. (1992). “Public Spaces / Collective Spaces”, In: Avermaete, T., Havik, K. (red.) Architectural Positions; Architecture, Modernity and the Public Sphere. Amsterdam, Sun Publishers. p. 85-92.

Un-habitat (2007). Tomorrow's Crisis today: the humanitarian impact of urbanisation. Intern Document.

Documentary’s and presentations

Adeyemi, Kunle. (Presentation at ETH Zurich, 11.11. 2010) Haak van der, B. (2002) Lagos/Koolhaas. Eeuw van de Stad, NCRV. Haak van der, B. (2007) Lagos Wide and Close. Submarine