Lagos - Harvard Project on the City

Bélanger, P., Chuihua Judy Chung, Joshua Comaroff, Michael Cosmas, Sonal Gandhi, A. David Hamilton, Lan-Ying lp, Jeannie Kim, Gullivar Shepard, Reshma Singh, Nathaniel Slayton, James Stone, Sameh Wahba “Lagos - Harvard Project on the City” in Mutations: Événement Culturel sur la Ville Contemporaine, edited by Rem Koolhaas, Sanford Kwinter, Stefano Boeri, Nadia Tazi & Hans Ulrich Obrist (Bordeaux: ACTAR, 2001): 650-719.

In collaboration with Harvard Design School's Project on the City, Mutations is a graduate-level analysis of issues related to the world urban condition. Year-long investigations tackle subjects as the impact of shopping on the city; the massive, sprawling West African city of Lagos; and the systematic structures of the prototypical Roman city.“Lagos: Harvard Project on the City” is a collaborative research project that investigates how Lagos, the symbol of West African urbanism, contradicts almost every defining feature of the modern city.  Yet as a city, it works. The project charts the development of Lagos from a small-scale, traditional settlement on the shores of the Gulf of Guinea in 1800 into one of the largest megacities in the world today. With an emphasis on modernity, infrastructure, and the role of oil and town planners in the 1970s, it observes the effects that globalization has had on the city’s identity, from its position on the cutting edge of African modernity through its dramatic decline during the oil crisis until today.