2050 LAGOS
Source: Guardian Lagos week, Inside Makoko: danger and ingenuity in the world's biggest floating slum - Tolu Ogunlesi
Amphibious City
Project City
Lagos, Nigeria
Student Name
Gi-chul Choe
2050 LAGOS
By 2032, severe inundation and storm surges resulting from global climate change have forced populations living on Victoria Island and Eko Atlantic to relocate to the land-side of Lagos Lagoon. Along this interior coastline a new Lagoon City was established, providing equitable housing for both displaced and existing populations. At the same time, the Pan-African Union decoupled from the global economy, and in turn, so too did Nigeria’s reliance on the petroleum industry, shifting Lagos’ economy towards sustainable practices of renewable energy and aquaculture.
Despite these events, extreme climate change has resulted in recurring storms that not only threaten Victoria Island but the mainland areas of Lagos as well. As a result, it was decided that following its evacuation, Victoria Island—the former business and wealth hub of Lagos—would be repurposed as an environmental reserve. This newly established Victoria Reserve protects Lagos from storm surges by deconstructing existing buildings and infrastructures in order to rewild the entirety of the Island. While the former petroleum industry and neoliberal urbanization decimated the existing mangroves along the Atlantic coast of Lagos, the new Victoria Reserve creates an opportunity to reestablish the mangroves and their associated habitats.
As a result, Victoria Reserve is now the center of Lagos biodiversity and its most important protection against sea-level rise. Upon establishing the Reserve, the Lagos government also established a network of renewable energy infrastructures off Victoria Reserve’s southern coast. In order to manage these two new environmental infrastructures, the Lagos government has deployed caretakers to reside in select areas of the Victoria Reserve. In addition to this small population of caretakers, some former residents of Victoria Island and Eko Atlantic chose to remain in the Reserve as part of newly formed Freetown communities. However, the majority of the residents of this area chose to migrate to the new Lagoon City in order to be protected from worsening climate events.
With the newly established protection from the Victoria Reserve, the residents of the Lagoon City are able to safely settle and develop truly Amphibious communities. In this way, the Victoria Reserve and Lagoon City have co-evolved to create an entirely new form of mega-city urbanism capable of protecting Lagos from worsening climate challenges while simultaneously expanding the city’s ecological performance.
LAGOS: AMPHIBIOUS CITY
Occupying 2050 Lagos: Amphibious City - The city in the frontier of Climate Change
LAGOS : city of water
Area: 452 square miles
Population: 14.368 million (UN World Urbanization Prospects, 2020)
Most populous city in Nigeria and African continent
10 times of population growth compared to 1970s (Rapid urban growth)
Source: Mapping 50 years of urban growth in Lagos - Lindsay Sawyer
In the wake of the 1970s Nigerian oil boom, Lagos experienced a population explosion, untamed economic growth, and unmitigated rural migration. This caused the outlying towns and settlements to develop rapidly, thus forming the present-day "Lagos Metropolitan Area", also known as "Metropolitan Lagos".
In Lagos, about two of every three people live in informal settlements. Less than ten percent of residents have access to piped water (for those that do, it is often riddled with sediment and unsafe to drink), forcing urban households to purchase water from vendors at up to three times the normal price charged by Lagos state. Only six percent of urban households have a flushing toilet that is connected to a sewage system.
Oil and Neoliberalism negative feedback loop
As in Venezuela during the same decades, the combination of oil wealth and entrenched elite rule led to a hollowing out of the Nigerian economy, with extreme income polarization, hyper-inflation, currency collapse, and rising poverty and unemployment, as industrial and agricultural exports were devastated by the overvalued naira. The onset of the global recession in 1981 and the collapse in oil prices threw the imbalances of the Nigerian economy into stark relief. (Learning from Lagos - Matthew Gandy)
Loss of habitats
Neoliberal "Global Cities"
Creating space of exception promoted for detached new city serving elites and international capitals. Global Cities discursively erase the deepening contradictions of Lagos in order to forge new connections to global economy. This may further deepen the structural and economical violence.
Mainland (Informal Expansion)
Makoko
Mushin
Source: https://www.amusingplanet.com/2014/04/makoko-floating-slum-in-nigeria.html
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Market_in_Mushin,_Lagos.jpg
Island (Formal Expansion)
Eko Atlantic
Lekki
projection
Population projection
Sea-level rise projection
Population
Sea-level
Year
Year
Source: GCIF working paper No.4: Population predictions of the 101 largest cities in the 21st century
-Hoornweg & Pope
UN World Urbanization Prospects, 2020
Source: Climate Change: Global Sea level (NOAA Climate.gov) - Rebecca Lindsey
Exponential Sea level rise (Climate Change) and
Population growth in 2050 Lagos
2020 - 2050 scenario
timeline
2025
Pan-African Union
decoupling from global economy
2032
Lagoon City
Victoria Island
2040
Decoupling from Petroleum
2030
Storm Surge
2036
City's edge
By 2032, severe inundation and storm surges resulting from global climate change have forced populations living on Victoria Island and Eko Atlantic to relocate to the land-side of Lagos Lagoon. Along this interior coastline a new Lagoon City was established, providing equitable housing for both displaced and existing populations. At the same time, the Pan-African Union decoupled from the global economy, and in turn, so too did Nigeria’s reliance on the petroleum industry, shifting Lagos’ economy towards sustainable practices of renewable energy and aquaculture.
settings
2030 victoria island
2050 victoria reserve
edge of lagos
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New York 2140, Kim Stanley Robinson
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Rem Koolhaas: Lagos wide & close interactive journey into an exploding city
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Speculative Everything: Design, Fiction, and Social Dreaming, Anthony Dunne and Fiona Raby
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A Glance at Daily Life Among the Caretakers of Britain's Small Islands
reference
pan-african union
Reimagining and Occupying the Kingelez Model
Model: Kimbembele Ihunga, 1994
Artist: Bodys Isek Kingelez