Lagos Be Unlimited [Video], a candid view of the passionate effort of a loyal city revellers
The people of cities such as Lagos are forging the world’s urban future—messily, scrappily, but with do-it-yourself energy and entrepreneurial verve…. a foreign visitor’s account. See Video
Lagos Nigeria
In my article “Global Bazaar,” I look at Lagos, Nigeria, a city that runs on unlimited entrepreneurial zeal. I collaborated with artist Andrea Haenggi to make the following video, which shows the neighborhoods mentioned in the article.
No matter how raw, cacophonous and bewildering the city’s environment may be, its people are engaged in a super-energetic life of self-development.
A dump picker moves up the recycling supply chain. A teenager sells drinking water to pay her school fees. A merchant journeys to China to supply the massive mobile phone market. A fisherman watches as his neighbors fill in the shoreline to create a road. The result is a paradox: a city that seems paralyzed by challenges where everyone is undeniably on the move. —Robert Neuwirth
The women maneuvered their crude canoes down narrow alleys of brackish water. They dipped their paddles lightly, gliding slowly past scrap-built houses elevated on spindly sticks that held the structures just beyond the reach of the tide.
Here and there a head popped out of one of the homes to check who or what was passing. In the small harbor where the women beached their boats, the shoreline was a work in progress.
People were filling the shallows, tamping down layers of trash to reclaim solid ground from the murky brown. Nearby, under a thatched-roof pavilion on one of those pounded patches stolen from the sea, a woman lit a match and put it to a pile of wood chips and sawdust at her feet. A lazy haze of smoke rose into the dusty air.
Greetings from Makoko, one of the most notorious squatter communities in one of the most notorious cities of the world: Lagos, Nigeria—a metropolis caught in a vortex between modernity and misery.
With hundreds of ATMs, scores of Internetcenters and millions of mobile phones, this bustling, maddening, overjammed city of between eight million and 17 million (depending on where you draw the lines and who does the counting) is fully plugged into the global grid.
A hyperentrepreneurial international trading center and the commercial capital of Africa’s most populous country, Lagos lures an estimated 600,000 new arrivals every year.
Yet most neighborhoods, even some of the very best, have no water, no sewers and no electricity. Makoko—part on land, part hovering above the local lagoon—is one of the mega city’s most deprived communities.
In Brief
“ One in seven people on the planet live in squatter communities or in shantytowns. More than half the workers of the world earn their living off the books.
- These markets and neighborhoods provide housing and jobs that governments and the formal private sector fail to.
- Governments need to work with these communities rather than neglect or suppress them.
Oshodi market, located at a major crossroads in the northern part of Lagos, Nigeria, was an entrepreneurial marvel—until a raid by security forces in 2009 demolished it.Image: Stuart Franklin Magnum Photos
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