megacity: Decoding the chaos of Lagos

In 2000, the United Nations established the Millennium Development 
Goals. One of them is to improve the lives of a hundred million slum 
dwellers by 2020, in terms of shelter, water, sewers, jobs, and 
governance. This will require enormous expenditures of money and effort, 
but even if the goal is achieved nearly a quarter of the world’s 
population — more than two billion people— will still be living in 
conditions like those in Lagos.

To some Western intellectuals, Lagos has become the archetype of the 
megácity—perhaps because its growth has been so explosive, and perhaps 
because its city- scape has become so apocalyptic. It has attracted the 
attention of leading writers and artists, who have mounted international 
exhibitions in London and Berlin. All this interest has somehow 
transformed Lagos into a hip icon of the latest global trends, the much 
studied megalopolis of the future, like London and Paris in the 
nineteenth century or New York and Tokyo in the twentieth. For several 
years, the Dutch architect and urban theorist Rem Koolhaas has been 
working with his students at the Harvard Graduate School of Design on a 
project to study the future of cities; he has gone to Lagos four times 
and produced several articles as well as a book to be published early 
next year, "Lagos: How It Works." Koolhaas once described Lagos to an 
interviewer as a protean organism that creatively defies constrictive 
Western ideas of urban order. ‘What is now fascinating is how, with some 
level of self-organization, there is a strange combination of extreme 
underdevelopment and development," he said.

cont'd....
http://www.vanguardngr.com/articles/2002/cover/november06/22112006/f422112006.html