- The two cases (Makoko and Eko Atlantic) have differences in the various stages of planning, investment, and building. Furthermore, the processes through which each project goes about developing its infrastructure are complicated by a multitude of stakeholders that aren’t all necessarily citizens of Lagos.
- Eko Atlantic is comparable to the rapid development of Dubai in the UAE, though Dubai’s development process differed largely from Lagos. Lagos acts as a point of financial through flow which works to accumulate capital, while Dubai put back their accumulated wealth from oil into the development of the city, creating a perpetual cycle of growth (Brook, 2013). To achieve urban growth, Lagos must look for foreign (colonial) investors as the main source of investment, and to do this, the city must become an image-generating machine – one that is suitable for large capital projects like Eko Atlantic. Thus, the Lagos State agenda turns to slum demolition to build an attractive, cleaner city, rather than funnelling efforts into public housing supply.
- The development projects have larger implications for the local rather than the global. Paradoxically, Eko Atlantic depends on global investment for its existence; a development that will likely only foster socio-spatial exclusion and limit access to services, further polarizing the communities in Lagos. The Makoko/Iwaya Regeneration Plan attempts to solve this issue by empowering the local. By doing so, projects that reflect the community’s needs such as the Makoko floating school can be constructed and utilized for future growth. Successful growth, then, rests on the local to a certain extent. But such informal communities are also at whim of destructive forces of modernity if the government decides they can make better use of the land.
- Housing in Lagos is not merely an issue of supply-side shortage or formalizing the informal. Rather, housing is embedded in a greater web of socioeconomic relationships, power, ecological concerns, and high-profile investment. Like much of the neoliberal logic in developing African states, housing is expected to be provided by private corporations, and there is a slow movement towards public private partnerships that needs to accelerate (Phillips, 2014).
Sources:
Adelekan, I.O. (2010). The vulnerability of poor urban coastal communities to flooding in Lagos, Nigeria. Environment and Urbanization, 22(2), 433-450. Available at http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/0956247810380141
Brook, D. (2013). How Dubai Became Dubai. [online] Next City. Available at https://nextcity.org/daily/entry/how-dubai-became-dubai
Philips, A. (2014). African Urbanization. Harvard International Review, 35(3), Webpage. Available at http://hir.harvard.edu/african-urbanization/