Lagos: How It Works

Lagos: How it Works is the result of more than eight years of research in Lagos, Nigeria. As a symbol of West African urbanism, Lagos contradicts almost every defining feature of the "modern” city. And yet it’s a city that works. In over five hundred pages, this mega-book documents the changing mega-city with essays, illustrations, maps, diagrams, rumors, interviews, images, and anecdotes. It follows the development of Lagos from a small-scale, traditional settlement on the shores of the Gulf of Guinea in 1800 into one of the largest megacities in the world today. With an emphasis on modernity, infrastructure, and the role of oil and town planners in the 1970s, it observes the effects that globalization has had on the city’s identity, from its position on the cutting edge of African modernity through its dramatic decline during the oil crisis until today.