arc en rêve  la revue

#1 / Africa(s)

Lagos
{Harvard Project on the City}

Harvard Project on the City is a seminar led by Rem Koolhaas in the Harvard Design School.
The program devoted to Lagos, Nigeria, was conducted by Pierre Belanger, Chuihua Judy Chung,
Joshua Comaroff, Michael Cosmas, Sonal Gandhi, David A. Hamilton, Lan-Ying Ip, Jeannie Kim,
Gullivar Shepard, Reshma Singh, Nathaniel Slayton, James Stone and Sameh Wahba.
It was published for the first time on the occasion of Mutations, cultural event on the contemporary
city, created by arc en rêve centre d’architecture, in Bordeaux (24 November 2000 - 25 March
2001), in Mutations p. 651-699, co-edition arc en rêve centre d’architecture / Actar,
Barcelona, 2000.

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 a near-
complete absence ot 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, it is 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 the conditions identified in Lagos are extreme cases, such extremity is generally a very
rational response to a dysfunctional scenario.The material logic of Lagos is 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 be 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.

PROPERTY
“Africans are constantly rearranging their social, economic, religious, and domestic lives in the
process of consuming more than they produce… Shifting designations creates a seemingly
permanent state of political ambiguity.” 1
Despite the presence of both land-use data collected at the regional scale and the national grid
system, a boundary for Lagos has never been drawn or agreed upon. The lack of clear spatial
boundaries has left open and unresolved the question of where authority over the land areas resides,
leading to disputes in legal and political administration and the practice of census enumeration.
Lagos Island is the only area in the city which maintained a fixed boundary between 1911 and 1962,
at 155 square miles (while its population, according to written sources, multiplied threefold).2 For
censuses taken between 1901 and 1962, the national area covered increased from 18 square miles to
2.722 square miles. The discipline of geography has failed to grasp the single fact that the nature of
accuracy and measure in Lagos is negotiable. Geography and the settlement of property in Lagos
cannot be assessed and measured according to the fixed definitions of the census and the aerial
photograph. Property lines are continually being reassessed and renegotiated in accordance with
intersecting land laws, taxes, claims, and interests. This structural skein camouflages its ordering
system, but recognizes that one’s right to reside and work in the city is flexible and mutable. The
negotiability of property lines means that there is no fixed typology in Lagos. Different types may
be introduced or develop, but they are invariably subject to reassessment and reconfiguration.

PLOT
“The unit of property in Lagos derives from the Yoruba compound. The compound is a collective
property and consists of an assembly of dwellings arranged in physical proximity. It is not strictly a
typology, representing instead a loosely bounded space wherein a group of interests coexist side by
side and in agreement. Its collective ownership as understood by customary law was hence not
communal in the sense of being communally built, managed, and used. Individual rights were
protected, and once an individual’s land had been settled and built on it was ‘divested’ of its
communal use, Thus, under customary law, land could be transferable as an individual saw fit.”3
Despite this original flexibility, the compound has urbanized in Lagos as a property bounded by a
perimeter wall and arranged around a courtyard and a communal alley. The compound develops
through provisional occupation within a series of boundaries, or as the proliferation of a single-cell
compound. As finances, means, and labor permit, the compound develops incrementally in a variety
of ways. The residential base is often supported by small-scale businesses that operate adjacent to or
in front of the dwelling, the profits or materials of which are gradually transferred to residential
additions and renovations. The physical result is a high heterogeneity of use and function at the
scale of the compound, homogeneous and porous space at the scale of the neighborhood.
The compound has modernized into a lucrative form of rental property. 8’ x 10’ rooms can easily be
built to accommodate a family or a few people.
Due to increased wealth and a new desire for individuality, the fission of t he single cell now
contributes to a process of compounding. Compounding occurs as 1) the construction of new rooms,
and 2) the making of new surfaces, vertical or horizontal planes, gratings, fences, and metal sheets
in ever more incremental layers. Compounding thus increases the amount of building program, as
new rooms collect more rent and new surfaces support new businesses or functions. Like fission in
physics, this process diversifies the compound programmatically, minimizes exterior space, and
densifies existing spaces. Compounding demands a constant reassessment of urban and property
boundary conditions and of socially constructed space.

LINE
If the difficulty involved in establishing property led to its physical delimitation by walls, increased
crime has transformed the property line into a means to exclude outsiders and to enforce and police
one’s property. This phenomenon is not limited to the wealthy areas normally targeted for crime, but
occurs across the socioeconomic spectrum of real estate, from Ikoyi, Mushin, to Surulere. Though
these areas were built according to different spatial typologies, they have been homogenized by
their shared physical continuity, leveling the city into one psychic environment. The wall is
typically constructed out of CMU blocks , barbed wire , shards of glass. and pebbles. A security
gate is used to cross its threshold. Not only Individual plots are walled this way; streets and districts
policed by area boys and local vigilante groups, or neighborhood security are gated off with secure
checkpoints. The construction of walls and security gates throughout the city has sparked an entire
industry : steel reinforcing bars are regularly used to con struct gates and entry doors, while
architecturally designed gates are sought after by wealthier home owners. The property line,
originally a conceptual and abstract legal division designed to divide, enclose, and exclude, has
materialized into a vertical wall whose surface has become an attractor for use, contamination, and
the establishment of new economies. The wall has come to be taken for granted as an infrastructure
that supports and serves a host of economies and small-scale indus tries. The wall itself can be used
as the support for carpets, or security gates ; in conjunction with a drain, it forms a thickened swath
of space between the plot/compound and the street. This space is occupied by vulcanizers, petty
traders, and can even accommodate sleeping in its width. The wall can also become a three-
dimensional barrier, with a depth of 3 to 4 feet, that can be used as a marketable space.

WALL
The explosive growth that Lagos has witnessed in the last two decades-the population rises by an
estimated 1,000/day – has assigned to the wall a new challenge. Today the wall is a machine for
guarding land against occupation by the poor, the masses. It has become more a way of controlling
surface than a mechanism against violence.
In Lagos, public space is continuously being occupied in new ways.
Pavements have become crowded with hawkers, food merchants, mechanics, tailors, hairdressers,
and all kinds of entrepreneurs. People jostle anarchically for turf, while ‘life’ seems to thrive in the
congestion of the streets. It is not clear which comes first: the rather extravagant and perhaps greedy
delimiting of land in order to exclude and construct one’s own interior ‘world’, or the density of
Lagos street life.
The interior that the wall defines does not necessarily remain static.
Compounds regenerate and occasionally reinvent themselves, but, as with the large tracts of walled-
in land that abound in Lagos, re-emerge as suburbia. In Lagos, suburbia is not confined to the
periphery of the city, as is often the norm; it implodes in the city.
Is Lagos staged ? Could it be that Lagos’s urbanity is artificially induced, rather ironically by the
same forces that seek to diffuse it ? Could it be that Lagos’s highly urban street life owes its
existence to an implosion of suburbia ?
TAXABLE OCUPATION OF LAND
The lack of clear zoning for industrial uses beyond the compounds of the multinational companies,
and the incessant compounding of the entire city, has pushed the labor market to occupy the
boundaries of private property and urban infrastructure. Road embankments, the underside of
flyovers, railway tracks, and the city’s multiple shorelines have been colonized by a host of
secondary industries and services-cement block factories, vulcanizers, roadside mechanics,
hairdressers, roadside markets, and so on. This lining of the road system, most evident in the filling
of the circular voids of cloverleaves, demonstrates the basics of space-planning: highway columns
are used as spatial dividers, foundation pads as workable surfaces, and open areas serve for the
markets or the collection and storage of materials. The undersides of flyovers are used for a range of
purposes from industry, to storage, to car parks which can be conveniently fenced off between road
columns. These land pieces belong either to the federal military government of Nigeria or to state
government. This type of territorialization of space represents a temporary but legal occupation of
land without ownership, a general lining of the urban fabric. Near Jankara, Lagos’s largest market,
four cloverleaves have been taken over as a recycling exchange. The recycling market has been
located on the land since the 1960s, except for temporarily displacement by the Federal government
during the construction of the highway (1973-78) ; the government has respected its land rights in
exchange for a tax. The market has adapted the new highway infrastructure to its highest use
potential. The order of the highway is in line with the production processes that take place there:
small assembly operations take place beneath the flyover, where groups of young men assemble
lanterns, cooking pots, and other metal wares. Others work as scavengers throughout the city,
collecting scrap metal and plastics and assorting them into material piles. Storage and warehousing
of these scraps takes place in the open area of the interchange. From scrap collection to sorting to
design to assembly to re-sale, the entire chain of commodity production occurs within the highway
interchange. The Jankara interchange services various corporations – Universal Steel is a regular
purchaser of scrap metal, and major plastic manufacturers are also regular customers – suggesting
that the transactions between lower and upper levels of the economy are converging on temporarily
settled federal land. In fact, the gradual institutionalization of facilities such as Jankara suggests that
the urbanization of capital in Lagos follows a different and more efficient logic than that of the
redundant and inefficient highway construction.

BOTTLENECKED
The terms ‘go-slow’ and ‘no-go’ are part of a popular lexicon replete with nomenclature that
expands the scope of traffic and movement to the level of urban consciousness. Go-slow describes
the ubiquitous traffic jam : lulled in congestion, captive to the road’s breadth, and thriving with
entrepreneurial activity. The go-slow is a transient condition, swelling diurnally with the usual
peaks of urban movement. The no-go, on the other hand, is less a condition than a place. Defined by
failed planning, bankrupted initiative, regular banditry, or physical collapse. the no-go stalls
circulation in a space of maximum vulnerability. As such, the Incomplete road or constricted
intersection is In a way recuperated, becoming controllable-and extremely valuable-real estate. Jam-
space, the totally negotiable, usually illegal and hugely productive space of the traffic jam, is not
something to fix, solve, or even rationalize. Jam-space cannot be controlled or short-circuited, only
bypassed. Rampant entrepreneurialism charges the bottleneck’s enormous physical friction with an
even greater social traction. As roads jam, their traffic spills into surrounding areas, expanding
motorable terrain by default. The road hemorrhages at points of maximum Inutility, subjecting
neighboring communities and adjacent landscapes to the perils and opportunities of dispersed road
traffiC. Bottlenecks encourage detouring, turning ‘neighborhoods’ – the white and gray space on the
map between thickly drawn expressways – into an infinity of potential routes. Any road can be a
feeder road, a collector, or an arterial. The detour is an inverse of positive proximity theory : rather
than relying on proximity to fixed infrastructure for residual economic benefits, the detour redirects
the infrastructure’s patrons to under-served areas. lams and detours allow more of the city to be
accessed more of the time.
Groups normally neglected by road traffic sometimes take advantage of the detour. Area boys, for
example, purposefully destroy road surfaces to redirect road traffic into ‘ambush areas’ or under-
patronized commercial districts. In 1996, the 600 km Onitsha/Owerri road East of lagos “caved in
on several spots, making motorists detour in selected places, driving through farmlands and remote
villages, crisscrossing abandoned terrain to reconnect to the highway. Many lives were lost in the
process, vehicles endangered and many lost theIr way In far flung communities. Drivers drifted
across the landscape like in the olden days.”4 Lagos’s detours are usually subtle, sometimes
dramatic, but never merely coincidental. Sometimes the detour is a self-administered flood that
forces people off an expressway and into a neighborhood. Sometimes the diversion might be a
roadway fire. At other times it might be coded as an arrangement between drivers and distributors,
whereby the drivers stop in traffic so that jammed passenger cars can be subjected to
roadway hawkers.
Lagos’s slowness has hardened. The expressways, originally dumped on the city to bind disparate
destinations and origins, are now almost completely unrecognizable to the planner’s eye. On a map
they still look like they organize the city. The view from above seems to make sense – ‘the city is
interconnected’. But at each of the plan’s intersections this omniscience collapses. The Lagos
‘street’ is inadequately described by throwaway terms like ‘channel’, ‘communications artifact’,
‘flow space’, or ‘arena for social expression’. Lagos has no streets ; instead, it has curbs and gates,
barriers and hustlers that control separate landscapes. Some areas might look like streets; they might
even look like superhighways. But even the Lagos superhighway has bus stops on it, mosques under
it, markets in it and buildingless factories throughout it. Lagos is as much a system of circulation as
it is any particular place. The spaces of the city are popularly described in terms of stoppages,
shortages, storage, stalling, overcompensations, and material depositions. Its roads are not plan lines
between points, but perhaps its most elastic and variable scapes, made more enabling by local
modifications which deny the road’s insistent linearity – guardrails are removed, jersey barriers put
aside. At all bottlenecks, the road is converted to allow movement in a maximum number
of directions.

OSHODI
Everybody seems to agree, albeit for different reasons, that Oshodi embodies Lagos’s identity.
Despite having escaped historical accounts, today Oshodi Is the most intense marketplace In all of
Lagos, and perhaps In all of Nigeria. located at the Intersection of the Apapa Oworonsoki ring road
and the city’s north-south spine, Agege road, it has transformed existing sites of the city’s transport
infrastructure – an incomplete on-ramp and an almost defunct railway.
At the precise point in the metropolitan diagram where the northern half of the ring road meets the
railway spine, the micro-scale of the plan hemorrhages. The two ends don’t quite snap together.
Oshodi is a failure of construction mechanisms to connect closing segments, a cloverleaf
intersection with only two-and-a-half leaves. The aborted Oshodi cloverleaf system respects the
right of way of the Nigerian Railway Corporation but ignores the logic of the flow of vehicular
traffic between perpendicular axes. The dysfunctional off-ramps, otherwise impediments to
circulation, have been recuperated as programmed cul-de-sacs. But Oshodi somehow works.
Tentative and even officially temporary, Oshodi’s ‘incomplete’ layout in many ways increases the
number of things it can do. Taking advantage of the interplay between the two different traffic
patterns – a fast-moving upperlevel overpass, and the slow-moving pedestrian along the rail line-
many services and amenities have colonized the off-ramps and roundabouts. Taken together these
form a complex overlap of programs : a train station, urban and suburban bus stations, hauling
stations, several different markets, auto garages, a school, at least one church, and hundreds if not
thousands of service stalls. Left incomplete, the intersection has a deleterious effect on metropolitan
traffic ‘ride-times’. But when measured in terms of efficiencies other than speed, the intersection is
enormously functional : its no-go turns congestion into destination. Oshodi is probably – who really
knows ? – the longest continuous ribbon of private/public property in Lagos5. All along its length,
the roadsides have been annexed and overrun with trading activities. An independent consulting
group, MetroBusiness, reports that almost half of the roads at Oshodi have been taken over in this
fashion. Oshodi’s traders and transport businesses have literally annexed the transport
infrastructure, the rail-line and Agege road, and have even taken measures to construct new roads
and new right-of-ways. They have turned infrastructure into a marketplace, non-place into
productivity. Claimed by multiple interests, traders, councils, hawkers, and agrebos (area boys), as
well as the NRC, Oshodi effectively belongs to no one. Continually interrupted by the train, Oshodi
sustains itself in a state of flux. On a twenty-four-hour cycle, it continually remakes and replenishes
itself through the accumulated exchanges of naira and goods and by the movements of it s
individual mobile traders. The swath of territorialized land has been divided into anywhere from
twenty to thirty parallel strips, each with varying degrees of temporariness, permanence, and flow.
Book-ended by more permanent concrete markets – on the west the electronics market, on the east
the distribution point – the market becomes more temporary as it condenses towards the center.
Though its typology is visible in other Lagos markets, the linear organization at Oshodi makes it
particularly succinct. Due to the instability surrounding ownership or claims on the land, the degree
of permanence of trading infrastructure corresponds to degrees of mobility. In previous accounts by
planners and geographers, Oshodi has symbolized the dysfunctional city – the aura of the last
remaining but dying colonial institution, the railway. Today, however, Oshodi provides further proof
and evidence for the city’s collective resistance. Targeted for ‘public enlightenment’ (read Operation
Sweep) by LAWMA, blacklisted by trafficologists (read enforcement), and recently in the process
of being repossessed by the Nigerian Railways Corporation, Oshodi persists in spite of all these
regulatory incentives, transforming defunct railway bars into the city’s most productive market.
In 1978, Alaba International Electronics Market was squeezed out of Lagos, dumped on a swamp
and left to Its own devices. Since then, the market has grown to include 50,000 merchants that net
over USD 2 billion annually. Officially described as an ‘unorganized sector’, Alaba accounts for
75% of West Africa’s electronics trade. like most of Lagos’ peripheral markets, Alaba is an orphan.
Begun as part of Mushin’s Alake market, Alaba had little significance until its electronics merchants
started selling speakers in the 1970s. As music amplification became more popular, the market took
off, moving loads of original, reconditioned and sometimes bogus Panabis, Gibson and Philips
speakers through its many stalls. The ‘77 FESTAC event raised demand for audio speakers at the
same time that it put pressure on the market to move away from its busy neighbor, the National
Stadium. So Alaba began a westward exodus. First, it went to Mile 2. But that location only
exacerbated the event’s effect on the market because by increasing the traffic exposed to the
merchants at the same time that it increased the merchant’s proximity to the Apapa Port supply.
Later that same year, the market was moved further west along the Badagry Expressway, to the
small jungle-enclave of Ojo. Chief Magnus Ubochi, chairman of the market association, says that
the move to Ojo was crucial, giving Alabans “a place where they could grow to infinity”.6 And they
nearly did. ‘Little Japan’ – as Alaba has been dubbed – was adopted by the Badagry local
Government Area in 1979. Combining itself with the local electronics market, the 2,800 displaced
Alaba traders soon had the second largest market in Lagos State, and far and away the most
profitable one. A large fire and the austerity measures of the 1980s weakened the market’s activities
as the importation of consumer goods was minimized. But parallel trade with Benin and new
concrete lock-ups buoyed Alaba through the eighties, establishing an operating formula based on
circumvention of traditional supply chains and vigilant self-defense. In the mid 1990s the Nigerian
Port Authority relaxed its import tariffs, enabling Alaba to benefit from two supply sources nearly
equidistant from the market site : the (official) Apapa Port and the (unofficial) Benin border town of
Seme. Straddling the two sectors maximized the market’s responsiveness to supply-side
opportunities, and it soon became the largest electronics market on the continent.
Alaba used this success to build a town around itself. Generating huge revenues for the Ojo local
Government Council, the market has earned a reputation as the region’s source for ‘second-class or
fake electronics’ imported from Asia. This reputation, however, has not handicapped business. The
Alaba Market Association recently raised N5O million to build Ojo an “ultra-modern secretariat and
car park”. The Association also donated the books and television sets that fill the market-funded
local library. Ojo’s fire station, electric substation and even telecommunications tower were
constructed at the Market Association’s expense.7 Outsourcing domesticity to the surrounding area,
Alaba has effectively transformed its host town into a bedroom community.
Left alone, Alaba International Electronics Market has sustained rampant growth. And, left alone, it
has had to reconcile this runaway expansion with increasing vulnerabilities. After an initial big-bang
and several years of capitalism-without-Keynes, the market is becoming self limiting. It is now
building its first fence – a 23 million naira wall to separate the mark.et area from its host city.
Having consolidated its edges, the market has had to adopt alternative strategies to grow. In addition
to building vertically, Alaba is metastasizing : mini-Alabas have turned up at Oshodi, Mile 12 and,
most recently, Abuja. Backed by an American investment company, the 600 plot Abuja electronics
market is being laid out on 20 hectares along the capital’s spine, Airport Road. It will be named
‘Alaba New’.

NOT A CITY
Alaba looks like a city. A ‘total self help effort’, the market has generated its own system of address,
its own type of street, its own provision of churches, its own banks, its own brand of democracy and
even its own form of justice. But it is a city without housing, without women (the market is almost
exclusively male) and without children. It has no nightlife because it has no night : its ‘hours of
operation’ are from 8am to 6pm. It is, of course, closed on Sundays.
As a business, Alaba acts on its own prerogatives. The Market Association funds itself with a
monthly security levy, donations by executive members, and fines collected from unscrupulous
merchants. In turn, the association gives money to the local government, the poor, and even takes
care of its past leaders. The DIY effort funds borehole drilling, latrine construction, and public
telephone booths. The association is paying for the new perimeter fence, television towers, street
gutters, electrical transformers, a telecom system and even a security vehicle to patrol the market.
But the Association does more than just service the market with infrastructures ; It’s also building a
new secretariat and courthouse. Members of the group have developed new, more vertical building
typologies to increase market densities. New stall types integrate a warehouse on the first floor with
an office on the second; merchandise is kept in the first floor lock-up from where it can either be
loaded directly onto transporters or set out on display. That is, the shops are both wholesale and
retail outlets. The market site is organized in three divisions: the ‘fancy section’ (lights, lampposts
and electrical fittings) ; the ‘electrical materials area’ (transformers, wiring, bulbs and spare parts) ;
and the ‘pioneer market’ (appliances, generators and circuitry). Nearly 50% of this merchandise is
secondhand – brought in from clearinghouses in the Middle East, Europe and Asia. The
preponderance of used goods has led to parallel industries of near – manufacture that operate across
the market’s sections. Reducing the bogus, spent, or out-ot-order appliances to heaps of circuitry,
transistors, and plastic shells, entrepreneurs organize whole alleyways into mechanical assays. A
production line of electricians, welders, painters and technicians then works in tandem to produce
electronic hybrids of pieced together radios, TVs and generators. Not so much a factory, the
secondary market is more a disassembly field within which all things have different values assigned
to them: mechanically functioning BUs (Built-Ups) and nonfunctioning but potentially valuable
parts or CKDs (Complete Knock Downs)8 These material movements occur between sections,
across streets and alongside buildings. As the market thickens, its interstices become
increasingly productive.
These gaps aren’t just leftover slack space. Alaba never had a plan to abandon, or a spectacular
failure to celebrate. Perhaps this is because Alaba is predicated on terrain, not streets; its structures
are more closely tied to landscapes than cities. Although It is provisionally bound to the line of the
highway it straddles, the market benefits from patterns of circulation and communication that are
irrespective of any road. Many of the market buildings are not fronted by a sidewalk or curb.
Instead, all scape is equally navigable by pedestrian, wagon or truck, Material movements in the
market vary tremendously in scale : huge shipping containers vie for space with circuit-filled
buckets. The indeterminacy of the road’s breadth allows a maximum number of things to happen on
it. At Alaba, a road might have generators, aggregate piles, parked cars, inventory, waste and even a
portable prison adjacent to one another.
A disciplined skyline matches the free-for-all on the ground plan e. The first generation lock-ups are
single-storey CMU structures with 10x10 and 10x20 footprints. The lock-up performs only one
function: it protects merchandise. In turn, merchants bring their own infrastructures to this basic
shell. Alaba is said to have the highest concentration of generators in the world. Portable generators
are propped up on tires just outside the lock-up doors, while larger fixed units are put in welded
rebar security cages and left in the street. Communications systems are also left up to the stall
owner. On approach, the market first appears as a thousand makeshift radio towers swaying way
above the rooftop’s satellite dishes. All hoopla about cellular toting nomads leapfrogging into the
twenty-first century is immediately checked. The Alaba system is as successful as it is perverse :
because communication is the crux of trade, merchants spend huge sums on private radio-wave
towers to insure cellular access. Attempts by telecom operators like EMIS to consolidate the
market’s network with base stations and shared antennae are met with skepticism.9 In a business
that directly sources inventory from markets in Singapore, Taipei, London and Dubai, the telecom
masts are a necessity. If networking has formal consequence, this is its apotheosis.

NOT A TRIBE
At Alaba’s center are its two most public institutions, each imposing different aspects of discipline –
one psychological and one political. The first, a blue Pepsi (‘The Choice of a New Generation’) ship
container riddled with Irregularly shaped, rebar-grated holes, is the town prison, It sits
conspicuously on the main street that passes through the market. The second, a simple shop, houses
the International Market Association Electronics Alaba (lMAEA) court. It is inconspicuously
located just opposite the prison. 
A legion of uniformed and plain-clothed security personnel operates between the punitive and
judicial branches. The IMAEA has put the two ends of Nigerian law enforcement trade to work on
the same beat : the vigilante and the rent-a-cop. What in other contexts would remain at opposite
ends of the legal spectrum are here brought under the same umbrella, Having the two systems in
place increases the market’s stability by keeping the two patrols suspicious of one another. What’s
more, the association regularly cycles through both area boys and private security companies to
keep temporary alliances from forming between criminals and the patrols. When infractions are
identified, perpetrators are either held in the prison or taken directly to the court and dealt with by
representatives of the IMAEA. Hearings are held on Fridays. It follows, then, that the largest
committee of the Market Association controls punitive measures : the IMAEA calls It “The Task
Force”. But this committee is only one of a long list of IMAEA groups that regulate market
activity ; it should not, for example, be confused with the Similarly named “The Tax Force”.
Although a chief leads the market, it is hardly a tribe. The chief is elected for a three-year term, and
is allowed a limit of just two terms. The larger organization is made up of a 40 member executive
council consisting of business leaders, the more authoritative elders council and 10 elected officials
that head the various ‘departments’. These include a development committee, a finance committee,
a public relations department, a publications department, an electricity committee, the tax and task
forces, a works and development committee, a security department, and even quality control groups
and trade organizations.10
These council groups are, of course, complimented by sub-committees, The Electrical Dealers
Association of Nigeria, EDA, a trade group associated with the IMAEA, was formed to pressure the
Apapa Port Authority to control the number of counterfeit and fake products coming into the
country. Fake products are bad for business – or at least the publicity associated with them is. Mr.
Celestine Obioguatu set up a sub-committee within EDA to tackle the PR problem. To get at the
problem directly, he insisted on creating a third tier of acronym – the Anti-Adulteration Committee
(AAC) ; the AAC reports to the EDA, which in turn reports to public relations department of the
AIEA. The AAC has the power to enforce market laws against fakery. In its first year of patrols, the
Anti-Adulteration Committee seized and then burned over 185,000 naira worth of bogus
electronics. The EDA implores prospective buyers to visit their secretariat for inquiries into the
pedigree of the market’s products, and even offers limited warranties on electronics bought from its
member stalls.11
In “A New Paradigm for Urban Development”, a paper delivered at a World Bank conference in
1991, A. L. Mabogunje proposed that the lines between the informal and formal sectors contained
the greatest potentials for new urbanisms. Calling for ‘institutional radicalization’ the very figure of
old-guard African urbanism suggested that temporary fusion between informal processes and
‘mature’ institutions might be read as a blueprint for progressive urban strategies.12 As ambitious as
such a suggestion might be, Alaba is already there. In fact, Alaba doesn’t just enable the ‘temporary’
sector-bridging that Mabogunje proposes, it hardens such arrangements. They become durable, not
radical ; the IMAEA is everyday evolving a more and more dynamic relationship with
mature institutions.
Banks, for example. In the last ten years, 21 lending institutions have formed In the market. Aside
from providing seed loans and micro-credit services for aspiring electronics dealers, the banks have
become part of the market’s operating system. By maintaining a database of each vendor’s
performance, the lending institutions are able to alert the IMAEA of its member’s activities,
Transgressions and discrepancies can be identified and punished, and successes rewarded. The
market association depends on these databanks to make forecasts and develop policy. In turn, the
banks rely on the market to design and establish loan structuring schemes specific to the
area’s merchants.

SCOUTING
“The Japanese experience in imitative technology cannot be easily duplicated but is instructive.
The country should be prepared to pay the high cost of modern technology and management. Our
laws on patents and copyrights are premature. We should, with a sense of urgency, encourage and
condone industrial espionage and piracy.”13
Mimesis is part of the Alaba formula : find your best men, give them plane tickets to Taipei,
Moscow, Singapore, Mexico city, Sao Paolo and Dubai (the Klondike of free market success) and
have them take notes. To go to Redmond, Palo Alto or even Tokyo (in 2000 at least) would be a
waste of time. Chief Ubochi calls these mercantile prospectors his ‘boy scouts’. The scout scans the
globe on market-funded missions of capitalist reconnaissance. In this way, the IMAEA continually
updates its operations with emerging models of late/post capitalism based on other sector-straddling
markets in Southeast Asia, Russia, and, most recently, the Middle East. These markets are all at the
forefront of what Mabogunje had termed ‘fusion’ and what others might call corruperation.
Alaba has long recognized the advantages of being between sectors.
Even geography reinforces its position. Being between Apapa port and the Benin border means that
it can be between official and unofficial – direct and parallel – trade routes. This increases the
number of supply channels it can rely on. As good as these sources are, however, the last ten year’s
phenomenal growth is more the consequence of a third channel: the airport.
“We are connected globally”, says Ubochi, pointing to the sky. If a lot of cheap Sanyo stereos
comes up for bid in Singapore, Alaba’s corps of scouts goes to Singapore. If a wholesaler folds in
Delhi, they go to India to clear any remaining stock. The 30 to 50 containers a day that arrive at the
market are filled with new and used goods from Singapore, Malaysia, South Korea, Taiwan, China,
Italy (gas cookers), Spain (freezers), and the United Arab Emirates (video games, generators). Japan
used to be on the list but has been dropped for the simple reason that Lagos-Tokyo flights have
become prohibitively expensive. To compensate, Alabans get their Japanese products in the United
Arab Emirates.

DOING DUBAÏ
On Friday, Jan. 30, 2000, a Kenyan Airlines plane carrying 134 Nigerian passengers crashed in a
lagoon outside of Abidjan. Coming inbound from Nairobi, the plane was unable to land in Lagos
because of the Harmattan dust hat forced it to continue on to the Ivory Coast. Five Nigerians
survived the crash. The casualties were victims of an increasingly popular and important air-route
between Lagos and Dubai. Most of those on the flight were merchants of the emerging ‘suitcase
trade’ between Africa and the free trade zones of UAE’s commercial capital.14
In the last five years airlines have dramatically stepped up their frequencies of flights between
Dubai and the major suh-Saharan trade areas of Johannesburg, Lagos and Nairobi. The UAE’s own
Emerates Air is leading this market : the carrier’s freight division, Emirates SkyCargo, has projected
a 24 percent increase in both revenue and tonnage for the 1999-2000 financial year on routes that
can move goods from the Far East to East Africa in less than 24 hours. Cubai’s logistical prowess
has actually led to a regular flow of Eastbound vegetables in one direction and Westbound
electronics in the other.15 Similarly, Kenya Airways is planning a 100 percent increase in frequency,
with a total of four weekly flights, from Dubai to Nairobi with connecting flights to Lagos and
Johannesburg. And, Nigeria Airways made Dubai its regional hub in 1997.16 Air travel between
Lagos and Dubai is largely the domain of the Igbo businessman – the Alaban or spare parts dealer
attracted to the Gulf’s enormous secondary of used computers, peripherals, and other electronic
goods. Dubai papers are filled with lists of second-hand goods for sale. Such merchandise has a
kind of mythic status in Lagosian markets. Called ‘tokunbo’ – Yoruban for a child born abroad – the
used goods instigate many secondary and tertiary material cycles that recuperate or recycle
products. Like Alaba, Dubai’s many Free Trade Villages have high percentages of out-of-date
electronics. Just as Alaba fashions Itself after Dubai, Dubai once fashioned itself after Singapore.
The development of Dubai dates back to the 1960s.
As Sultan Ahmed Sulayem, chairman of Jebel Ali and managing director of Dubai Ports Authority
puts it : “(at) that time, we were fascinated by what Singapore was doing in developing its port. So
we sent people to Singapore towards the end of the 1960s to see what we could learn.” The plans
remained on the drawing board as the country did not have the necessary funds to ‘translate them
into reality’ until the discovery of oil. Money generated by the country’s abundant petroleum
reserves was sunk into huge infrastructure projects including the Jebel Ali Free Trade Zone.
Like Alaba, Dubai’s only real asset is its relative position : halfway between Singapore and London,
halfway between Moscow and Nairobi. The city couldn’t help becoming a hub ; and, of course, all
hubs can’t help becoming duty-free cities. Shopping replaced petroleum as the country’s
distinguishing feature as Dubai put itself on the map with both the world’s largest shopping festival
and the world’s tallest hotel.
Dubai’s geography, once its greatest advantage, is now actually limiting its growth. But at the
moment of its apotheosis, the Emir has rescued his emirate with a new geography – electronic
space. In the year 2000 Dubai will launch itself into an electronic infinity with the christening of
dubaielectroniccity.com.
Like Alaba, Dubai’s population is mostly male (70+%) and mostly from afar. Expatriates are far and
away the majority in the UAE, mostly coming from the India, the Philippines and Pakistan. And
like Alaba, Dubai benefits from a branded, if unbridled, form of capitalism. To attract investors, the
Dubai government did the usual : the standard urban cocktail of the ‘pro-business package’. But to
keep clients in the desert they took the off-the-shelf business package and hyperbolized its every
promise. In Jebel Ali Free Trade Zone, foreign investors are not only assured 100 percent
ownership, but also enjoy a renewable tax holiday forlS years during which they do not have to pay
income, corporate, building or land taxes. The Airport Free Zone has an almost identical pro-
everything gist, but promises an exemption on import duties and allows the free movement of
capital in addition to the standard list of freebies.

ALABAS
Clifford Geertz once wrote that the informal market was doomed to archaic inefficiencies. “The
trader, said Geertz, is perpetually looking for a chance to a make a smaller or larger killing, not
attempting to build up clientele to a steadi y growing business.”17 Geertz was troubled by the
bartering, haggling and ‘inefficient’ price structuring mechanisms of informal environments. Since
1963, social anthropology has spent enormous amounts of energy describing how such systems are,
in fact, based on enormously powerful and effective social organizations that are nothing if not
efficient networks. The most recent cases – the Alaban conditions – present the most terrifying
potentials. Unfettered, and unleashed, Alaba’s severe social program is matched by an incredibly
compelling post-urban example : “Within the globalization regime, there is an emphasis on speed,
incessant signification, unimpeded capital flows, the hyper-reality of credit and fiscality, and the
amplification of micro-dynamics as keys to profit. Accordingly, the deployment of new modalities
of organization acting outside juridical, parliamentary and ‘moral’ constraints are increasingly
required. The consolidation of all institutional life produces its marginality that is a space outside
the rules and norms which must be turned to at times when the norms are unable to do so. The
marginality constitutes a locus through which disparities, problems, power conflicts and procedures
can be ignored, mediated or circumvented. Globalization has provided a vast new range of
opportunities for economic and political actors to operate outside increasingly outmoded laws and
regulatory systems, as well as to spawn new relation ships among them. African cities exude an
availability to these opportunities precisely because they appear outside of effective control, and
thus anything could happen.18 Alaba is almost nothing. Its most striking feature is its flatness. Only
recently has it had to bother with the maison domino. But its skyline is still somehow striking. All
around, 30 meter antennae sprout from between the market stalls. Huge satellite dishes sit
precariously on puny rooftops. Cell phone ownership is incredibly high, and the country’s greatest
concentrations of what would otherwise be called Mail Boxes Etc. can be found at Alaba. In fact, on
an off day, when the market is empty, it looks more like a communications center than a
commercial one.

TO LAGOS
In The Coming Anarchy, Robert D. Kaplan contends that the contemporary West African
condition is sufficiently radical, unfamiliar, and intense to warrant a new round of
postcolonial ‘exploration’, with different intentions and a more intensive methodology than
the nineteenth-century campaign prosecuted on the same turf. Lagos, Nigeria is an ideal first
port of call. A pressure cooker of scarcity, extreme wealth, land pressure, religious fervor, and
population explosion, Lagos has cultivated an urbanism that is resilient, material-intensive,
decentralized, and congested. Lagos may well be the most radical urbanism extant today, but
it is one that works.
In the past, Lagos has been the beneficiary of the best and brightest minds of Western
planning ; with a few exceptions, all have determined that Lagos has none of the
infrastructures, systems, or even environmental resources to support population levels
considerably below current levels. People and products move, networks are maintained,
shifted and hardened, and made resilient. The survival strategy of the Lagos agglomeration
might be better understood as a form of collective research, conducted by a team of eight-to-
twenty-five million. The hypothesis and purpose of this ‘investigation’ is debatable, but
statistical analysis shows an asymptotic condition. Every graph of the city population
(resource usage, ‘urban safety’) takes one of two turns in the last ten years charting Lagos:
either off-the-chart explosion or a newly horizontal, infinite approach to zero. Asymptotic
behavior seems to indicate a terminal condition, a steady state, suggesting that the Lagos
condition might simply be twenty, fifty or a hundred years ahead of other cities with more
apparently familiar structure and lifestyle. If the terminal condition of urbanization, or of
capitalism, has been a long-awaited milepost, the subject of fantasy, then the scenario and
strategies to be found here may be instructive to other urban isms following Lagos to
the asymptote.

Notes
1. D. Hecht & M. Simone, Invisible Governance ; The Art of African Micropolitics (NY :
Autonomedia, 1994, pp. 83)
2. P. O. Ohadike, “Urbanization : The Case of Lagos”, Urban Affair Quaterly, vol. 3, nº 4, June
1968, pp. 72
3. M. G. Yabuku, Land Law in Nigeria, London, Macmillan, 1985
4. “Perils of the Onitsha Expressway”, in The Vanguard, Lagos, 9:01 : 1999
5. D. Aradeon, “Replanners Options for a subcity”, Glendora Review, v. 2, nº 1, pp. 51-58.
6. Chef Magnus Ubochi, in personal conversation.
7. Ojo LG, “Attributes Financial Strength to AIaba Market”, Post Express. 21 May 1998.
8. Peil, Lagos, The City is the People, p. 87.
9. Kelechi Obasi, “More Lints from Emis”, Africa News Service, 27 September 1999.
10. “Alaba electronics dealers rally against sub-standard products”, Post Express, 16 juin1999.
11. Uchendu Wogu, “FG indirect ober influx of fake electrical products”, Post Express, 9 November
1998.
12. Mabogunje, A.L., Proceedings of the World Bank Annual conference on Development
Economics, 1991.
13. FormeR Nigerian Secretary of Finance Allison Ayida, The Rise and Fall of Nigeria, Malthouse
Press, Lagos, 1990, p. 47.
14.“Kenya Airways Crash : Unending Tears for Nigerians”, The Vanguard, 5 February 2000.
15. Jimmy Yeow, “Emirates can help put the buyers in West Asia and sellers in Uganda through
Emirates’Skychainnetwork, “Business Times [Malaysia], 5 April 2000.
16. Middle East News Items, 30 September 1997.
17. Geertz, Peddlers and Princes, Social Change and Economic Modernization in Two Indonesian
Towns, University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 1963, p.35.
18. Abdou Maliq Simone, Urban Processes and Change in Africa, p. 105.