City Space Investigation - Lagos
introduction
Lagos mesmerizes. Multiple the terms to seize this African megacity: from black Venice, the African paradigm, the informal city to the proto-city of the 21st century.
But what once was called the black Venice is probably best summarized by its inhabitants: Stuck daylong in car traffics, with seemingly no movement, the remaining space bustling with vendors, a sole expression might bring this reality to the point: "This is Lagos!"
The former capital of Nigeria seems to have surpassed its functional capacities long time ago. Despite its air of immediate collapse, still more than half a million migrants arrive yearly. A growth pace statistics even gave up to record: the population should be somewhere between 8-14 million inhabitants. Lagos is the example par excellence of self-organization, housing and commerce are mostly organized beyond any legal frameworks. The informal sector accounts for 60 percent of all economic activity, ranging from street hawkers to the production centres of imitations of Western goods.
The incredible ingenuity of its citizens has awakened international interests: over the last years several exhibitions, such Century City in London (2001), the Documenta 11 in Kassel featured information about Lagos and not to forget Rem Koolhaas' latest passion in this conurbation. But even he had to admit that it is very difficult to imagine any projects for future stimulus.
Focusing on informal production of urban space, the last destination of the City Space Investigations seems logical. Centering on the learning experience of its participants the Urban Detectives would like to invite students and professionals alike to decipher the embodiment of informality and reflect on the potential for design and planning profession.
aim & framework
CSI.Lagos is the third edition of the City Space Investigations (CSI) workshop series organized by Urban Detectives. After a very successful pilot project in 2008 in the city of New York (CSI.NY), a second edition was organized in 2009 in São Paulo (CSI.SP). Like each edition in the CSI series the CSI.Lagos aims at bringing together students and professionals to work in a synergic setup on relevant issues of urbanization in the 21st century. Theoretical focus is urban informality (a.k.a the social construction of the city), to which pertains issues like the marginality, the right to the city and grassroots participation. The shortterm goal of the CSI series is to expose workshop results to stimulate further discussion among different stakeholders in urban governance. A long term vision is to provide insights into urban dymics that can inform real projects or propose such.
The CSI framework is based on participatory approaches, transdisciplinarity and ict enhanced learning to effectively address the challenges of an international workshop. CSI.Lagos mainly aims to bring students from Delft University of Technology (TU Delft) together with a partner university in Lagos. An open call will also go out to design professionals (local and foreign) to join the workshop enabling synergies.
setup
The CSI.Lagos workshop follows a classical three staged program:
The core phase is the on-site workshop (In Lagos) scheduled from the 28th April to 8th of May 2010. During these 11 days all participants will jointly explore the city, receive input from different parties (eg. academics, planners, developers, community leaders) and undertake collective and individual research (on the informal production of urban space). The CSI Lagos on-site phase is concluded by a closing seminar.
A preparation phase (Pre Lagos) will be organized in February and March with an evening lecture and debate series defining a theoretical and methodological framework. For background on the design practice a lunch lecture series 'Architect in Africa' is organized. In addition a multimedia workshop is taking place each Monday in collaboration with the Media department of the Faculty of Architecture (TU Delft) to provide participants with a toolkit for the on-site workshop (multimedia techniques will include photo, video, audio, hand drawing, gps, web applications and weblogs).
During the post production phase (Post Lagos) the material collected during the on-site investigations will be processed to generate final products that reflect the workshop ideology, as to say being flexible in frame, disciplines and scales. An exhibition is planned in Lagos and one in the proximity of Delft, as well as a publication and submission of articles to several magazines and conferences.