Informal Cities

Swiped from the Africa Unchained blog:

An excerpt from Robert Neuwirth's Lecture 'The Extroverted City of System D' a contribution to the book Open City:

In Lagos, everything is informal. The bus system is informal—the government got out of mass transit business decades ago (though it has recently stepped back into public transport with a bus rapid transit line) and the system that includes more than 75,000 danfos was held together informally by the National Union of Road Transport Workers as one-part mass transit and one-part Ponzi scheme. One of the largest formal supermarkets in Lagos buys most of its product from informal wholesalers. Some major multinationals here distribute their products through informal networks. And informal merchants invest in the formal world.

Authorities in the city acknowledge that as much as 80 percent of the work force—and Lagos has between nine and 17 million inhabitants, depending on where you draw the boundaries and who’s doing the counting—is involved in the informal sector. The federal government also suggests that somewhere around 60 to 70 percent of the country’s economic activity derives in some way from the informal sector—and this means that, in aggregate, merchants like Prince Chidi Onyeyirim and Fatai Agbalaya are more important to Nigeria’s future than Shell, Mobil, and Chevron, the multinational oil giants that pump sweet crude from the Niger River Delta.

As Mega-Cities continue to explode in population around the world (particularly in Africa) they continue to stretch the conceptual frameworks of what cities were meant to be and how they are organized. Most modern cities may appear to chaotic but when examined closely, they are heavily structured and organized systems that control and dictate the flow of traffic, development, water, sewage, air and open space. The lack of those uniform structural systems in dense urban places creates chaos and challenges the belief of whether that urban place is truly a defined city jurisdiction with a definitive boundaries to the city's power of influence and control. The uninformed mega-cities of today have no beginnings and endings to the jurisdiction's scope of power.

The World's Next Mega City: Lagos, Nigeria

Lagos, Nigeria is experiencing unprecedented growth which is triggering a whole host of problems for the city and the region. Some of the problems are normal for a rapidly expanding city but unlike other mega cities, Lagos is almost devoid of any master-planned infrastructure. For a city of 12-18 million which continues to grow (estimates indicate if will be the 3rd largest city in the world by 2020), resources such as clean water, garbage disposal and running electricity continue to frustrate residents.

Not to paint a picture of Lagos as a an overcrowded slum or shantytown but it is a city of contrasts. The city is also a city of massive wealth that is currenly constructing multiple billion dollar developments to suite the needs of it's rising middle class and wealthy residents. At the same time many wonder whether these new developments will still be plagued with the old problems of running electricity and proper drainage.

To give you and idea about how fast this city has grown, the city of Lagos only had 300,000 residents in 1950. In 2020, it is predicted to have over 23 million people within the city. Imagine Toledo, Ohio blossoming into New York City in a span of fifty years.

But the reason that I am posting about Lagos is because I am interested in how developers and government plan developments for a mega-city. Recently Slate Magazine ran a 5 article piece about Lagos about Growth with or without planning. In the article, I found these quotes about planning very interesting,

"Most places do planning before development," said Moses Ogun of the Nigerian Institute of Town Planners. "Here they do development and building before they've done the planning. I call it disjointed incrementalism."

The architects of the 1998 city master plan promised to develop 28 new districts in Lagos and ease congestion, but they didn't follow through, according to Ogun. Only 15 percent of the 1985 master plan was implemented.

I wonder if any idea of a master plan has to be thrown out the window without complete tear downs of certain parts of the city to install new infrastructure and better streets (sort of like what Paris and London did in the 17th centuries to clear out slums and create grand avenues). At this point the horse has been let out of the barn but some type of planning has to be put in place just for human health and environmental conditions alone. Any thoughts...how would you solve this conundrum?