We have stopped by the Floating School, a two-storey solar-powered wooden structure that floats on the Lagos lagoon on a bed of plastic barrels. “The authorities in Lagos seem to approach city planning from an authoritarian point of view – as if their desire for development transcends everything.”. Makoko is a slum community living in wooden buildings on stilts over the water of Lagos Lagoon in Nigeria, and canoes are the residents’ primary means of transportation. The appellation used for the collective, by the Lagos State Government and NGOs, is Makoko-Iwaya Waterfront. Today Makoko is home to people from a variety of riverine communities along Nigeria’s coast. Neuwirth bristles at the idea of deliberately transforming slums into models of urban development. Then there’s the hustle and bustle of human activity: women smoking fish or peddling food and bric-a-brac; half-naked children rowing their own boats or playing on the verandas of the wooden shacks; congregants in white garments, singing and dancing in impromptu churches on boats. Without a doubt, they still have problems. ScienceDirect ® is a registered trademark of Elsevier B.V. ScienceDirect ® is a registered trademark of Elsevier B.V. His territory contains the only two primary schools: Whanyinna Nursery and Primary School, founded in 2008 by his younger brother Noah; and the floating school, which has generated more positive buzz for Makoko than any other thing in recent years. No epidemic here. Population numbers are uncertain, but the growth rate is estimated at around 7.5 percent per annum. “The government thinks that this will be a hub of disease, there’s nothing like that,” Baale Emma told me in 2014 at the height of the Ebola scare. This embarassment is what spurs demolitions like the one in 2012. The home building industry. Wooden shacks stand on stilts, as boats named Bejamin, Gbenon Nu or Ahude glide across the still water. We use cookies to help provide and enhance our service and tailor content and ads. On the ground floor are two sections: one his living quarters, the other a Baptist church that he gifted to a missionary friend. The Baale thinks politicians’ first terms are periods of respite: no one wants to needlessly alienate critical voting blocs when there’s a second term to be won. The dredgers, he explains, descend a wooden ladder into the depths of the lagoon, armed with only a bucket and the will to live. But both sides are united by the water, upon which they depend for livelihood, as well as the Yoruba language, which serves as a lingua franca in a settlement where multiple languages are spoken: French, English, Yoruba and Egun. It is a floating structure, making it less vulnerable to flooding and extreme weather. The challenges are significant, socially, economically and not least environmentally in view of changing climate and frequent flooding. “The community will build it, we will supply drugs, staff and equipment,” he says. Baale Shemede’s house is built from wooden planks, and rises, like every other structure here, on stilts out of the brackish water. There are three possible options for Makoko’s future. Second is that the government will stop obsessing with demolition and focus instead on providing the infrastructure that citizens expect of their administrators – hospitals, schools, electricity – and allow Makoko to develop in its own way and at its own pace, as Neuwirth recommends. Close-up, though, it throbs with the kind of energy that marks Lagos out and has made it a darling of urban theorists. In the minds of Makoko’s children, the long-lens DSLR camera has come to symbolise white privilege. “Why can’t communities simply be communities and develop in the organic way that we allow other communities to develop?” Pointing to Brazil’s favelas and Istanbul’s gecekondu communities, he says: “They are inspirational in that people have developed them themselves, without government and real estate types pushing them around. Two months later, a Serac housing affiliate known as the Urban Spaces Innovation began work on a regeneration plan for Makoko. Copyright © 2020 Elsevier B.V. or its licensors or contributors. But both sides are united by the water, upon which they depe… Start studying Makoko Case Study. In January 2014, USI submitted the plan to the Lagos State Ministry of Urban and Physical Planning. Then they have to climb out with a sand-laden bucket that will be emptied on to the floor of a boat. By then, 30,000 people had been rendered homeless. Whatever the politicians and developers might think of it, Makoko is a real community, built by the families that live there. I have now visited Makoko enough times to realise just how wary its people have become of the “tourists” – many of them white – who stream past, cameras in hand. Amid the evening rush-hour traffic on the bridge, Makoko basks in the dull orange light of the setting sun, a soothingly familiar presence. © 2020 Guardian News & Media Limited or its affiliated companies. Lagos is starved of land, but has no shortage of property developers; were Makoko to sink (or be crushed), in its place would rise apartment blocks and villas priced out of the reach of all but the wealthiest Lagosians. “The smokehouses, and the circuits of importing that bring the fish there to be smoked. Makoko shares with Lagos the exceptional situational inventiveness that makes the entire city tick. “The people of Makoko told the governor that we have a plan to develop the community,” says Lookman Oshodi, a USI project manager who helped develop it. Yet this city on stilts, whose residents live under the constant threat of eviction, has much to teach, Tue 23 Feb 2016 06.17 EST For a city keen to re-create itself as forward-looking, Makoko is a dismal advertisement, and the government knows this. But they are stabilising themselves and, over time, knitting themselves into the fabric of their cities. One of them is Emmanuel Shemede, crowned in 2005 as the Baale of Adogbo Village. The appellation used for the collective, by the Lagos State Government and NGOs, is Makoko-Iwaya Waterfront. Everyone who flies into Lagos to do business on the Islands is likely to find themselves passing over the Third Mainland Bridge. Copyright © 2015 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved. “The floating school has been adopted by the Lagos State government as a model that’ll be used for developing the houses on water in the community,” says Oshodi. In 2013, Kunlé Adeyemi, who designed the school, told me: “Eko Atlantic is about fighting the water; [here in Makoko] we’re saying – live in the water!”. The idea the government can push people from their homes with no discussion seems normal in Lagos. Doctors Without Borders opened a floating clinic in January 2011; although very popular when it launched, it stayed open less than a year.

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