I do most of my walking in Chicago. I do it selfishly, all alone, in search of something anonymous, yet universal. People smoke, or lean, or fight, or build, like me in transit between one something and another. This streetside limbo is beautiful to me. The functional, shelter-to-shelter hustle of college does nothing for these aesthetic cravings; a pavement odyssey in New Haven plays like brass to my city’s gilded views. In the town of skyscraper, Wright, Van der Rohe and the Black Belt, my leisure takes on meaning—a directionless ritual creates direction, as my feet and mind absorb the city that has only ripened in my absence.

I am hungry and the city feeds. You haven’t heard? Urban landscapes are the final frontier, showing public culture in high relief. In foreign cities I eschew public transport, instead stomping out miles of cheap anthropological thrills. In my mind I wear a pith helmet and khaki explorer’s gear; I am coasting down a concrete river, looking at the natives in awe.

But I rarely walk in Lagos. Each time I visit, I realize anew that this metropolis cannot be cradled in the palm. Every day 21 people in Africa’s most populous nation decide to move there. And thus the boiling, mapless sprawl of Lagos is not easily mastered, by foot or any other conveyance. Sheets of dust rise during winter harmattan, loosed by crowds gorging the city streets and centers. Traffic is a textbook nightmare. Compared with planned Abuja or collegiate Ibadan, this Nigerian city’s riches are almost too untamed to bear.

So it is a continual surprise that traditional assumptions about Africa place the continent in a rural context. The recent juggernaut growth of many cities in sub-Saharan Africa, especially Lagos, explodes this postulate of local, non-industrial and isolated public life. Those marooned mud huts are of your imagination—among others, the cities of Dar es Salaam, Maputo, Cairo, Nairobi and Cape Town have experienced insane growth in the second half of the twentieth century. George Packer’s recent article on Lagos for the New Yorker probes the Nigerian metropolis as a new paradigm for urban studies: the modern “megacity.” Within such cities, with over ten million people—Bombay, New York, Buenos Aires and Tokyo are other global examples—population explosions and rural-to-urban intranational migrations have made the city a central concern of social scientists and area specialists. I feel somewhat ahead of the curve.

Packer documents unplanned, metastasizing slum neighborhoods, homelessness, traffic jams, rampant unemployment, and the “wage puzzle”—a paradox of miniscule earnings and high prices for basic commodities like rice. “Lagos has become the archetype of the megacity, perhaps because its growth has been so explosive, perhaps because its cityscape has become so apocalyptic,” he writes. This is all fact. But in Lagos, the world feels farthest from its fiery end. People live, people work, people walk. And in fact, determining the texture and quality of such urban spaces beyond material underdevelopment also relies upon viewing the city as a locus of shared memory, commemoration, mutual experience and interaction—a living organism. I walk to prove this point.

Dutch architect and built environment pontificate at large Rem Koolhaas is right there with me. Where Packer sees despair, he sees a fertile corpus of streets and peoples, and perhaps, even, the future of civilization. Koolhaas’ work is as much about ideas as it is buildings. His writings on the city (S M L XL, Content, notably) fixate on the diversity of logics that govern civic spaces. A city dweller’s access to and use of urban sites and sounds can empower or disenfranchise, connect or isolate, distinguish or homogenize. According to Koolhaas in Lagos: How It Works, that city’s shortcomings “have generated ingenious, critical alternative systems.” The improvisational energies of Lagos and other megacities are feng shui writ extra large—converting an underplanned, “dysfunctional” environment into a humming marketplace for ideas, goods and services.

This reasoning takes on economic, political, neighborhood- and clan-based relations, a complex chain of causality that is often difficult to engage with at the level of formal reportage or demographic representation. Almost everyone in Lagos is undernourished in some critical way—but alongside the ever-expanding slums and high-rises of today’s Lagos, there is something tremendous at work. I can feel it in my feet.

(continued below)

“I have come to sing the lore of the modern mega-city,” reads the header on the page beginning Odia Ofeimun’s meditation on Lagos, published in Glendora Review, a local magazine. Ofeimun tackles the issue of civics and disorder in his home environment, distinguishing it as “megacity” four years before Packer’s New Yorker article and other works placed the urban phenomenon under a microscope.* He covers much of Packer’s territory—Ofeimun meditates generally on the “sprawl and anonymity” engendered by gargantuan size, “the problem of filth and public conveniences” and “the loneliness of individuals in the large crowds that pepper the landscapes and mindscapes of the city.” Ofeimun’s last mention of “mindscapes,” however, follows my instinct—spatial homes inform spaces of the mind; the dynamic city ecosystem is fuel for reflection.

Ofeimun establishes the megacity in general, and Lagos in particular, as a fertile creative space. Packer writes with measured astonishment at the vastness of Lagos’ informal sector, its civil engineering in disarray and the grim fortitude with which the poorest Lagosians take on urban life without a safety net. He speaks admiringly of the “hustle” of Lagos and its unorthodox entrepreneurial spirit, but Ofeimun pays equal admiration to the “citiness” of Lagos and the artistic stimulus urbanism provides. Industrial signifiers are only part of the city’s text, he writes; “citiness” is an aesthetic “to which writers and folklorists have been responding in a fairly coincident manner whether in ancient Greece, Rome or in the completely non-literate urban environments that were known to sub-Saharan Africa. In this respect, Charles Dickens’ London and Cyprian Ekwensi’s Lagos belong to the same bend in the river.”

This is completely true. I’ve felt this sameness in every steep face of steel and glass that tests my neck and every stoop, or crowd, or intersection, that tests my patience. Like my feet, Ofeimun encourages a closer look at the civis—cities produce knowledge, encounters and synergies, and as such “approximate the highest form of poetics.” The cities I have known are excellent storytellers. In the megacity or any other, I walk inside a million histories, ten million poems sharing common geography. Augustine’s rarified City of God is met with the fallen City of Man—and I am the tangible link. So I walk on.

BY DAYO OLOPADE
“LANDSCAPE: CHICAGO” PAINTINGS BY ALVIN BLACK III

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This entry was posted on Thursday, May 3rd, 2007 at 8:32 pm and is filed under Express, Urbane. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.