CTPwiki - User contributions [en-gb]

Kola - Luxury Under Construction

2025-01-30T14:24:51Z

KolaHR:

<div class="metadata">
== Ready Under Construction ==
'''Kola Heyward-Rotimi'''
</div>

“One question we get a lot is when will Eko Atlantic City be ready? Well the answer is: today!”<ref>“When will Eko Atlantic be ready?” ''YouTube'', uploaded by Eko Atlantic, October 23<sup>rd</sup> 2019, <nowiki>https://youtu.be/kqJ-2KRfJd0?si=-ePHv6h3ubzR1dbU</nowiki>.</ref> This quote is from the developers of an urban development project in Nigeria. They are constructing a planned city called Eko Atlantic on an artificial island approximately half the size of Manhattan, transforming Lagos’s shoreline. The island, and the city, barely existed fifteen years ago. Today, Eko Atlantic is simultaneously one of the most luxurious places in Nigeria and an active construction site. Emphasis on ''active'': during my visit,<ref>Thanks to Stanford’s King Center on Global Development for funding this fieldwork.</ref> there was never a view of the horizon that was clear of tower cranes. Take Eko Pearl Towers as an example, a popular destination. The twin skyscrapers house restaurants, a massive pool, and apartments, all while being surrounded by planes of grassy sand and bulldozers. How does the collapse of distance between the construction site and the completed aspects of the city cohere as one location, one social world?
[[File:Pearltowers.jpg|center|frameless|600x600px]]

This cohesion is what I think of as creating seamlessness, bridging the physical gap between what remains incomplete and what has already been built, and making the concept of “incomplete” irrelevant. Luxury living is made possible in Eko Atlantic through creating an aesthetic seamlessness that does not deny the physical environment’s fragmented nature, but perhaps relies on that ragged edge, the mixer trucks and piles of concrete, to contrast the fine dining and photo booths. Eko Atlantic gleams in social media and advertising. Through such lenses, it is “ready.”
[[File:Pearltowerspool.jpg|center|frameless|600x600px]]

The creation of seamlessness in Eko Atlantic and other planned cities like it is the same mechanism that coheres Fanon’s white “settlers’ town” and black “native town” into the bifurcated place of the colony.<ref>Fanon, Frantz. ''The Wretched of the Earth''. Grove Atlantic, 2007. p. 39.</ref> These urban imaginaries of construction can act as agents of displacement, like Netanyahu’s architectural pitch deck to pave over the cities and lives that Israel burns to the ground in Gaza,<ref>Roche, Daniel Jonas. “Netanyahu unveils regional plan for “free trade zone” with trains to NEOM.” ''The Architect’s Newspaper'', May 21<sup>st</sup> 2024, <nowiki>https://www.archpaper.com/2024/05/benjamin-netanyahu-unveils-regional-plan-free-trade-zone-rail-service-neom/</nowiki>.</ref> and the Thiel-backed “city startup,” Praxis, voicing public excitement over Trump’s threats to invade Greenland, which would secure them the land to construct their “free city” based on “Arthurian myth."<ref>@praxisnation. “How to transform Greenland into a technological powerhouse, terraforming experiment, and US strategic asset founded on Arthurian myth.” ''Twitter/X'', January 8<sup>th</sup> 2025, 6:03pm, <nowiki>https://x.com/praxisnation/status/1877038352412680567</nowiki>.</ref>
[[File:Hedgeandbuilding.jpg|center|frameless|600x600px]]

In framing seamlessness in planned cities so that its displacement and violence is centered, instead of its ability to create an affect, it is useful to understand the planned city as a topology of repression. Instead of an aesthetic emerging from the constituent parts, including the people who build, work, and live there, the negative imprint of the land is what truly makes seamlessness. Seamlessness relies on terra nullius logic, suppressing whatever may contradict its claim to the blank slate. These projects function on a collapse of distance between the material, virtual, and psychosocial layers of the city.
[[File:Ekoatlanticcontruction.jpg|center|frameless|600x600px]]

=== Responses ===
"How is the seamlessness translated between project material (decks, renderings, fly-through videos) and the actual materialization of these plans? You mention this in the beginning of your piece, and I think it resonates with my text about architecture's imaging cultures and the gap between the projected and the actual. A rendering of a planned city is not the same as the planned city itself, and the notion of seamless (experience, urbanism, gaze, ...) is represented and made operative in different ways in both of these domains." --Matīss Groskaufmanis

"Would you re-emphazise chaos as a strategy of deconstructing colonial/westernized sobriety of control in architecture and urbanism? Would fiction and world making fantasies still be a tool of creation that you consider (but from the opposite perspective)?" --Maja Funke
[[Category:emd]]

= Comments =

Kola - Luxury Under Construction

2025-01-30T13:20:18Z

KolaHR:

<div class="metadata">
== Ready Under Construction ==
'''Kola Heyward-Rotimi'''
</div>

“One question we get a lot is when will Eko Atlantic City be ready? Well the answer is: today!” (Eko Atlantic). This quote is from the developers of an urban development project in Nigeria. They are constructing a planned city called Eko Atlantic on an artificial island approximately half the size of Manhattan, transforming Lagos’s shoreline. The island, and the city, barely existed fifteen years ago. Today, Eko Atlantic is simultaneously one of the most luxurious places in Nigeria and an active construction site. Emphasis on ''active'': during my visit,<ref>Thanks to Stanford’s King Center on Global Development for funding this fieldwork.</ref> there was never a view of the horizon that was clear of tower cranes. Take Eko Pearl Towers as an example, a popular destination. The twin skyscrapers house restaurants, a massive pool, and apartments, all while being surrounded by planes of grassy sand and bulldozers. How does the collapse of distance between the construction site and the completed aspects of the city cohere as one location, one social world?
[[File:Pearltowers.jpg|center|frameless|600x600px]]

This cohesion is what I think of as creating seamlessness, bridging the physical gap between what remains incomplete and what has already been built, and making the concept of “incomplete” irrelevant. Luxury living is made possible in Eko Atlantic through creating an aesthetic seamlessness that does not deny the physical environment’s fragmented nature, but perhaps relies on that ragged edge, the mixer trucks and piles of concrete, to contrast the fine dining and photo booths. Eko Atlantic gleams in social media and advertising. Through such lenses, it is “ready.”
[[File:Pearltowerspool.jpg|center|frameless|600x600px]]

The creation of seamlessness in Eko Atlantic and other planned cities like it is the same mechanism that coheres Fanon’s white “settlers’ town” and black “native town” into the bifurcated place of the colony (39). These urban imaginaries of construction can act as agents of displacement, like Netanyahu’s architectural pitch deck to pave over the cities and lives that Israel burns to the ground in Gaza (Roche), and the Thiel-backed “city startup,” Praxis, voicing public excitement over Trump’s threats to invade Greenland, which would secure them the land to construct their “free city” based on “Arthurian myth” (@praxisnation).
[[File:Hedgeandbuilding.jpg|center|frameless|600x600px]]

In framing seamlessness in planned cities so that its displacement and violence is centered, instead of its ability to create an affect, it is useful to understand the planned city as a topology of repression. Instead of an aesthetic emerging from the constituent parts, including the people who build, work, and live there, the negative imprint of the land is what truly makes seamlessness. Seamlessness relies on terra nullius logic, suppressing whatever may contradict its claim to the blank slate. These projects function on a collapse of distance between the material, virtual, and psychosocial layers of the city.
[[File:Ekoatlanticcontruction.jpg|center|frameless|600x600px]]

=== References ===
“When will Eko Atlantic be ready?” ''YouTube'', uploaded by Eko Atlantic, October 23<sup>rd</sup> 2019, <nowiki>https://youtu.be/kqJ-2KRfJd0?si=-ePHv6h3ubzR1dbU</nowiki>.

Fanon, Frantz. ''The Wretched of the Earth''. Grove Atlantic, 2007.

@praxisnation. “How to transform Greenland into a technological powerhouse, terraforming experiment, and US strategic asset founded on Arthurian myth.” ''Twitter/X'', January 8<sup>th</sup> 2025, 6:03pm, <nowiki>https://x.com/praxisnation/status/1877038352412680567</nowiki>.

Roche, Daniel Jonas. “Netanyahu unveils regional plan for “free trade zone” with trains to NEOM.” ''The Architect’s Newspaper'', May 21<sup>st</sup> 2024, <nowiki>https://www.archpaper.com/2024/05/benjamin-netanyahu-unveils-regional-plan-free-trade-zone-rail-service-neom/</nowiki>.

=== Responses ===
"How is the seamlessness translated between project material (decks, renderings, fly-through videos) and the actual materialization of these plans? You mention this in the beginning of your piece, and I think it resonates with my text about architecture's imaging cultures and the gap between the projected and the actual. A rendering of a planned city is not the same as the planned city itself, and the notion of seamless (experience, urbanism, gaze, ...) is represented and made operative in different ways in both of these domains." --Matīss Groskaufmanis

"Would you re-emphazise chaos as a strategy of deconstructing colonial/westernized sobriety of control in architecture and urbanism? Would fiction and world making fantasies still be a tool of creation that you consider (but from the opposite perspective)?" --Maja Funke
[[Category:emd]]

= Comments =

Kola - Luxury Under Construction

2025-01-30T11:36:32Z

KolaHR:

<div class="metadata">
== Ready Under Construction ==
'''Kola Heyward-Rotimi'''
</div>

“One question we get a lot is when will Eko Atlantic City be ready? Well the answer is: today!” (Eko Atlantic). This quote is from the developers of an urban development project in Nigeria. They are constructing a planned city called Eko Atlantic on an artificial island approximately half the size of Manhattan, transforming Lagos’s shoreline. The island, and the city, barely existed fifteen years ago. Today, Eko Atlantic is simultaneously one of the most luxurious places in Nigeria and an active construction site. Emphasis on ''active'': during my visit,<ref>Thanks to Stanford’s King Center on Global Development for funding this fieldwork.</ref> there was never a view of the horizon that was clear of tower cranes. Take Eko Pearl Towers as an example, a popular destination. The twin skyscrapers house restaurants, a massive pool, and apartments, all while being surrounded by planes of grassy sand and bulldozers. How does the collapse of distance between the construction site and the completed aspects of the city cohere as one location, one social world?
[[File:Pearltowers.jpg|center|frameless|600x600px]]

This cohesion is what I think of as creating seamlessness, bridging the physical gap between what remains incomplete and what has already been built, and making the concept of “incomplete” irrelevant. Luxury living is made possible in Eko Atlantic through creating an aesthetic seamlessness that does not deny the physical environment’s fragmented nature, but perhaps relies on that ragged edge, the mixer trucks and piles of concrete, to contrast the fine dining and photo booths. Eko Atlantic gleams in social media and advertising. Through such lenses, it is “ready.”
[[File:Pearltowerspool.jpg|center|frameless|600x600px]]

The creation of seamlessness in Eko Atlantic and other planned cities like it is the same mechanism that coheres Fanon’s white “settlers’ town” and black “native town” into the bifurcated place of the colony (39). These urban imaginaries of construction can act as agents of displacement, like Netanyahu’s architectural pitch deck to pave over the cities and lives that Israel burns to the ground in Gaza (Roche), and the Thiel-backed “city startup,” Praxis, voicing public excitement over Trump’s threats to invade Greenland, which would secure them the land to construct their “free city” based on “Arthurian myth” (@praxisnation).
[[File:Hedgeandbuilding.jpg|center|frameless|600x600px]]

In framing seamlessness in planned cities so that its displacement and violence is centered, instead of its ability to create an affect, it is useful to understand the planned city as a topology of repression. Instead of an aesthetic emerging from the constituent parts, including the people who build, work, and live there, the negative imprint of the land is what truly makes seamlessness. Seamlessness relies on terra nullius logic, suppressing whatever may contradict its claim to the blank slate. These projects function on a collapse of distance between the material, virtual, and psychosocial layers of the city.
[[File:Ekoatlanticcontruction.jpg|center|frameless|600x600px]]

=== References ===
“When will Eko Atlantic be ready?” ''YouTube'', uploaded by Eko Atlantic, October 23<sup>rd</sup> 2019, <nowiki>https://youtu.be/kqJ-2KRfJd0?si=-ePHv6h3ubzR1dbU</nowiki>.

Fanon, Frantz. ''The Wretched of the Earth''. Grove Atlantic, 2007.

@praxisnation. “How to transform Greenland into a technological powerhouse, terraforming experiment, and US strategic asset founded on Arthurian myth.” ''Twitter/X'', January 8<sup>th</sup> 2025, 6:03pm, <nowiki>https://x.com/praxisnation/status/1877038352412680567</nowiki>.

Roche, Daniel Jonas. “Netanyahu unveils regional plan for “free trade zone” with trains to NEOM.” ''The Architect’s Newspaper'', May 21<sup>st</sup> 2024, <nowiki>https://www.archpaper.com/2024/05/benjamin-netanyahu-unveils-regional-plan-free-trade-zone-rail-service-neom/</nowiki>.
[[Category:emd]]

= Comments =

File:Hedgeandbuilding.jpg

2025-01-30T11:17:38Z

KolaHR:

A hedge and a building on the horizon.

CommentStreams:E5db58f5d8bc597a65460b52999017ec

2025-01-25T00:31:55Z

KolaHR:

Thanks Maja! I like your suggestion about bringing in more examples of seamlessness for these projects...I'll think up some good ones. Very interested to learn more about what you're thinking with "re-emphasizing chaos," does this mean a sort of reclamation project to you? Direct action and disruption of these sites? Something else entirely? I do wonder what it might mean to bring chaos to projects like these. It's definitely something to think about...

As for your second question, I definitely think fiction and worldbuilding have potential--I'm skeptical of whether it's *liberating* potential, though. Or maybe I'm skeptical of how easy it might be to access its liberating power. I think a lot about Kodwo Eshun's "Further Considerations on Afrofuturism" and Mark Fisher's "SF Capital" when it comes to science fiction's recuperation by the military industrial complex. Speculative fiction has some obvious sway if it can help validate multibillion dollar projects like these planned cities...for it to work the other way, the "opposite perspective" as you put it, then I wonder what the fiction's relationship to cultural and financial capital might need to be.

CommentStreams:Dc88f83cdada81232f1739d9a64e660b

2025-01-25T00:22:27Z

KolaHR:

Hi Matīss! Great exploration of the links that digital simulation has with the physical world. It's exciting that Jussi will be moderating our panel, since I think that your descriptions of the "ongoing enmeshment of computational and material worlds" has a lot of resonance with his interpretation of operational images. Your approach to this topic seems centered on visual techniques as well, though you establish a wider foundation for "simulation" by grounding it through "computation" as the primary operating framework. Though we're talking about BIMs and other methods that rely on visual techniques, the digital/computational anchor of your analysis brings focus to the information flows that are afforded by the visual, rather than the visual itself. Meaning that your work is keeping our attention on the content of these visual techniques, and the transformations the content undergoes between digital and physical forms (which I appreciate because I also share a similar interest!).

I feel like occasionally, there's an implied causality in this piece between digital and physical representations. An example is "Most buildings nowadays are built at least twice—first as a model, then as a physical object." You're definitely onto something with linkage between virtual abstractions and physical constructions, though I'd say there's a lot of cases where digital and physical spaces are coevolving. In some of the cases I'm thinking about, the construction site, its physicality, functions as generative material for the development of digital mirror worlds, which then go on to structure the buildings-to-come at the site. It's a push-and-pull dynamic that makes it hard to put one in front of the other. I'm curious what you think about this, and I'm excited to talk more!{{DISPLAYTITLE:
Digital/Physical Causality
}}

CommentStreams:296c634e500c0378dd9eb26b0213c8b2

2025-01-24T20:44:27Z

KolaHR:

Hi Maja! Your analysis of 2024 Parisian city surveillance is very effective for me, particularly how you aim to understand what "dataveillance" does in crafting, and controlling, citizens' behavior. That makes the Faster section of this piece quite the highlight for me. The specifics you provide of the city's transformation into a heightened state of screen-oriented, camera-oriented surveillance is striking. Thinking alongside Shannon Mattern (particularly her book The City Is Not a Computer), I'd argue that autonomous systems of surveillance might have changed their distribution of materials, but these systems have been equally present in urban design before the CCTV era. I'm wondering if further contextualizing Paris's present situation within a history of urban design's biopolitical desires to shape the law-abiding citizen might be beneficial to further illuminating the security transformation you describe in this piece.

What I'm curious about is: before the streetlamp became "a surveillance instance in empire green or anthracite," and was "a distributor for romantic light," what parts of the city took the role of the surveillance instance? Why have the avenues of surveillance shifted to include the streetlamp? The mention of "antifascist countermovements" makes me think of May '68, and what shifts in their battle with city surveillance might have resulted in our present moment. I totally understand if this line of questioning takes us too far down a historical path and is outside the scope of this piece, but it was great that your approach to this subject matter got me thinking about these topics. (And I didn't even get to the concluding section which I really like, tying shifts in surveillance to the international scale of "digitalization of warfare".) I appreciate this multifaceted analysis of urban control--thanks for sharing!{{DISPLAYTITLE:
Today's Surveillance, Informed By the Past
}}

Kola - Luxury Under Construction

2025-01-11T02:09:33Z

KolaHR:

<div class="metadata">
== Luxury Under Construction ==
'''Kola Heyward-Rotimi'''
</div>

The contemporary development of planned city projects, i.e. new urban environments designed from top-down and built from scratch, bears an obvious lineage with modernist projects of the 20<sup>th</sup> century like Brasilia and Chandigarh, where national aspirations were expressed via architectural schematics that promised a seamless, calculated future. A good portion of contemporary planned cities[1] emphasize their exclusivity, paired with security methods for keeping the outside world at a distance. On the occasion that these self-described enclaves transfer from renderings and pitch decks into the physical world, the land that they are built on is used as if it were a blank slate, regardless of how “blank” it truly is. They peddle enclave fantasies that displace local populations. Hence, planned cities also inherit the lineage of the suburbs, the walled compound, the gated community. They sit between grandiose, new capital construction and the micromanaged design of planned neighborhoods. What warrants closer consideration is how seamlessness of aesthetic vision and lifestyle arises from a planned city and the relationships between its constituent materials, including the physical construction site, the architectural renderings, the engineering simulations, and so on.[[File:Pearltowerssky.jpg|center|frameless|600x600px]]Take Nigeria’s planned city boom as an example. The country is no stranger to predetermined urban developments, with the capital, Abuja, being one of the most iconic examples, and Lagos having a history of new districts built on artificial land dredged from the ocean. Nigeria’s contemporary wave of planned developments has a wide range, many of them being repurposed real estate projects marketed as full cities. Eko Atlantic is one of Lagos’s planned neighborhoods, advertised as a full city independent from an older development project, Victoria Island, despite sharing a border. In development since 2013, Eko Atlantic is an active construction site slightly less than half the size of Manhattan. Emphasis on ''active'': during my time visiting Eko Atlantic, there was never a view of the horizon that was clear from tower cranes. I took many pictures from the decks of the Eko Pearl Towers, twin skyscrapers in the middle of the construction zone. The Pearl Towers include restaurants, a massive pool, and apartments for sale.[[File:Pearltowerspool.jpg|center|frameless|600x600px]]
Eko Atlantic has embedded its construction zone within active cycles of social and commercial flows to and from Lagos. This is an act of creating seamlessness, bridging the physical gap between what remains incomplete and what has already been built, and making the concept of “incomplete” irrelevant. What has been built and opened to (rich segments of) the public functions in Lagos’s social sphere as a fully realized, high-class destination. Luxury living is made possible in Eko Atlantic through creating an aesthetic seamlessness that does not deny the physical environment’s fragmented nature, but perhaps relies on that fact of the ragged edge, the bulldozers and piles of concrete, to contrast the cosmopolitan dining and photo booths.
[[File:Pearltowers.jpg|center|frameless|600x600px]]
Creating seamlessness out of a fragmented place could be framed as a generative act, because seamlessness exists as a tangible affect solely through developers and residents successfully imprinting their desired lifestyle across the myriad layers that constitute the city. In the context of the planned city, seamlessness is truly an act of aesthetic transmutation. Writing about how planned cities achieve their aesthetic lends itself easily to “worldbuilding”/“worlding” as verbs of choice, especially in the face of their popularity in art/design scenes ever since their escape from Science Fiction and Fantasy craft terminology. However, it would be misleading to frame this seamlessness as generative without bringing attention to lives that must be displaced, destroyed, or ignored for it to come into being.

The creation of seamlessness in planned cities, which in this case is synonymous with the creation of the “illusion” of seamlessness in planned cities, is the same mechanism which coheres Fanon’s white “settlers’ town” and black “native town” into the “bifurcated” place of the colony.[2] It is an agent of displacement. The creation of seamlessness in planned cities makes violence more palatable to global media networks, like Netanyahu’s architectural pitch deck to replace the cities and lives that Israel burns to the ground in Gaza[3]; Saudi Arabia’s NEOM planned city hushing over the exploitation of construction workers and the displacement and killing of locals[4]; the displacement crises occurring across Lagos for new planned developments[5]; and the Thiel-backed “city startup,” Praxis, voicing public excitement over Trump’s threats to invade Greenland, which would secure them the land to construct their “free city” experiment based on “Arthurian myth.”[6]

In an effort to frame the creation of seamlessness in planned cities so that its ''displacement'' and ''violence'' is centered, instead of its ability to ''create'' an affect, it is useful to understand the planned city as a topology of repression. Instead of an aesthetic emerging from the constituent parts, including the people who build, work, and live there, the negative imprint of the land is what truly makes the aesthetic. A planned city that relies on terra nullius logic to justify its existence can only function by suppressing whatever may contradict its claim to the blank slate. Seamlessness is created through tight, interlocking acts of repression embedded within the material, virtual, physical, and psychosocial layers of the planned city.
[[File:Ekoatlanticcontruction.jpg|center|frameless|600x600px]]
----[1] “Planned cities” is one name out of many for this type of urban development. Depending on the audience and what they are trying to convey about the project, “planned cities” might be referred to as “new cities,” “smart cities,” “charter cities,” etc. I have typically referred to them as “smart cities,” mainly to emphasize the technodeterminist ethos that drive their construction. In this piece I mostly use “planned cities” to highlight these projects’ historical precedent within urban design.

[2] Frantz Fanon, “Concerning Violence.” ''The Wretched of the Earth''. (LaVergne: Grove/Atlantic, Inc., 2007).

[3] Daniel Jonas Roche, “Netanyahu unveils regional plan for “free trade zone” with trains to NEOM,” The Architect’s Newspaper, May 21<sup>st</sup> 2024, <nowiki>https://www.archpaper.com/2024/05/benjamin-netanyahu-unveils-regional-plan-free-trade-zone-rail-service-neom/</nowiki>.

[4] Human Rights Watch, ““Die First, and I’ll Pay You Later”: Saudi Arabia’s ‘Giga-Projects’ Built on Widespread Labor Abuses,” December 4<sup>th</sup> 2024, <nowiki>https://www.hrw.org/report/2024/12/04/die-first-and-ill-pay-you-later/saudi-arabias-giga-projects-built-widespread</nowiki>.

[5] Oluwafemi Olajide and Taibat Lawanson. “Urban Paradox and the Rise of the Neoliberal City: Case Study of Lagos, Nigeria.” ''Urban Studies'' 59, no. 9 (July 1, 2022): 1763–81.

[6] Praxis (@praxisnation), “How to transform Greenland into a technological powerhouse, terraforming experiment, and US strategic asset founded on Arthurian myth,” Twitter/X, January 8<sup>th</sup> 2025, <nowiki>https://x.com/praxisnation/status/1877038352412680567</nowiki>

=== References ===

[[Category:emd]]

= Comments =

File:Ekoatlanticcontruction.jpg

2025-01-11T02:09:01Z

KolaHR:

An image of a building being constructed in Eko Atlantic.

Kola - Luxury Under Construction

2025-01-11T02:05:24Z

KolaHR:

<div class="metadata">
== Luxury Under Construction ==
'''Kola Heyward-Rotimi'''
</div>

The contemporary development of planned city projects, i.e. new urban environments designed from top-down and built from scratch, bears an obvious lineage with modernist projects of the 20<sup>th</sup> century like Brasilia and Chandigarh, where national aspirations were expressed via architectural schematics that promised a seamless, calculated future. A good portion of contemporary planned cities[1] emphasize their exclusivity, paired with security methods for keeping the outside world at a distance. On the occasion that these self-described enclaves transfer from renderings and pitch decks into the physical world, the land that they are built on is used as if it were a blank slate, regardless of how “blank” it truly is. They peddle enclave fantasies that displace local populations. Hence, planned cities also inherit the lineage of the suburbs, the walled compound, the gated community. They sit between grandiose, new capital construction and the micromanaged design of planned neighborhoods. What warrants closer consideration is how seamlessness of aesthetic vision and lifestyle arises from a planned city and the relationships between its constituent materials, including the physical construction site, the architectural renderings, the engineering simulations, and so on.

Take Nigeria’s planned city boom as an example. The country is no stranger to predetermined urban developments, with the capital, Abuja, being one of the most iconic examples, and Lagos having a history of new districts built on artificial land dredged from the ocean. Nigeria’s contemporary wave of planned developments has a wide range, many of them being repurposed real estate projects marketed as full cities. Eko Atlantic is one of Lagos’s planned neighborhoods, advertised as a full city independent from an older development project, Victoria Island, despite sharing a border. In development since 2013, Eko Atlantic is an active construction site slightly less than half the size of Manhattan. Emphasis on ''active'': during my time visiting Eko Atlantic, there was never a view of the horizon that was clear from tower cranes. I took many pictures from the decks of the Eko Pearl Towers, twin skyscrapers in the middle of the construction zone. The Pearl Towers include restaurants, a massive pool, and apartments for sale.
[[File:Pearltowerssky.jpg|center|frameless|600x600px]][[File:Pearltowerspool.jpg|center|frameless|600x600px]]
Eko Atlantic has embedded its construction zone within active cycles of social and commercial flows to and from Lagos. This is an act of creating seamlessness, bridging the physical gap between what remains incomplete and what has already been built, and making the concept of “incomplete” irrelevant. What has been built and opened to (rich segments of) the public functions in Lagos’s social sphere as a fully realized, high-class destination. Luxury living is made possible in Eko Atlantic through creating an aesthetic seamlessness that does not deny the physical environment’s fragmented nature, but perhaps relies on that fact of the ragged edge, the bulldozers and piles of concrete, to contrast the cosmopolitan dining and photo booths.
[[File:Pearltowers.jpg|center|frameless|600x600px]]
Creating seamlessness out of a fragmented place could be framed as a generative act, because seamlessness exists as a tangible affect solely through developers and residents successfully imprinting their desired lifestyle across the myriad layers that constitute the city. In the context of the planned city, seamlessness is truly an act of aesthetic transmutation. Writing about how planned cities achieve their aesthetic lends itself easily to “worldbuilding”/“worlding” as verbs of choice, especially in the face of their popularity in art/design scenes ever since their escape from Science Fiction and Fantasy craft terminology. However, it would be misleading to frame this seamlessness as generative without bringing attention to lives that must be displaced, destroyed, or ignored for it to come into being.

The creation of seamlessness in planned cities, which in this case is synonymous with the creation of the “illusion” of seamlessness in planned cities, is the same mechanism which coheres Fanon’s white “settlers’ town” and black “native town” into the “bifurcated” place of the colony.[2] It is an agent of displacement. The creation of seamlessness in planned cities makes violence more palatable to global media networks, like Netanyahu’s architectural pitch deck to replace the cities and lives that Israel burns to the ground in Gaza[3]; Saudi Arabia’s NEOM planned city hushing over the exploitation of construction workers and the displacement and killing of locals[4]; the displacement crises occurring across Lagos for new planned developments[5]; and the Thiel-backed “city startup,” Praxis, voicing public excitement over Trump’s threats to invade Greenland, which would secure them the land to construct their “free city” experiment based on “Arthurian myth.”[6]

In an effort to frame the creation of seamlessness in planned cities so that its ''displacement'' and ''violence'' is centered, instead of its ability to ''create'' an affect, it is useful to understand the planned city as a topology of repression. Instead of an aesthetic emerging from the constituent parts, including the people who build, work, and live there, the negative imprint of the land is what truly makes the aesthetic. A planned city that relies on terra nullius logic to justify its existence can only function by suppressing whatever may contradict its claim to the blank slate. Seamlessness is created through tight, interlocking acts of repression embedded within the material, virtual, physical, and psychosocial layers of the planned city.
----[1] “Planned cities” is one name out of many for this type of urban development. Depending on the audience and what they are trying to convey about the project, “planned cities” might be referred to as “new cities,” “smart cities,” “charter cities,” etc. I have typically referred to them as “smart cities,” mainly to emphasize the technodeterminist ethos that drive their construction. In this piece I mostly use “planned cities” to highlight these projects’ historical precedent within urban design.

[2] Frantz Fanon, “Concerning Violence.” ''The Wretched of the Earth''. (LaVergne: Grove/Atlantic, Inc., 2007).

[3] Daniel Jonas Roche, “Netanyahu unveils regional plan for “free trade zone” with trains to NEOM,” The Architect’s Newspaper, May 21<sup>st</sup> 2024, <nowiki>https://www.archpaper.com/2024/05/benjamin-netanyahu-unveils-regional-plan-free-trade-zone-rail-service-neom/</nowiki>.

[4] Human Rights Watch, ““Die First, and I’ll Pay You Later”: Saudi Arabia’s ‘Giga-Projects’ Built on Widespread Labor Abuses,” December 4<sup>th</sup> 2024, <nowiki>https://www.hrw.org/report/2024/12/04/die-first-and-ill-pay-you-later/saudi-arabias-giga-projects-built-widespread</nowiki>.

[5] Oluwafemi Olajide and Taibat Lawanson. “Urban Paradox and the Rise of the Neoliberal City: Case Study of Lagos, Nigeria.” ''Urban Studies'' 59, no. 9 (July 1, 2022): 1763–81.

[6] Praxis (@praxisnation), “How to transform Greenland into a technological powerhouse, terraforming experiment, and US strategic asset founded on Arthurian myth,” Twitter/X, January 8<sup>th</sup> 2025, <nowiki>https://x.com/praxisnation/status/1877038352412680567</nowiki>

=== References ===

[[Category:emd]]

= Comments =

Kola - Luxury Under Construction

2025-01-11T02:02:44Z

KolaHR:

<div class="metadata">
== Luxury Under Construction ==
'''Kola Heyward-Rotimi'''
</div>

The contemporary development of planned city projects, i.e. new urban environments designed from top-down and built from scratch, bears an obvious lineage with modernist projects of the 20<sup>th</sup> century like Brasilia and Chandigarh, where national aspirations were expressed via architectural schematics that promised a seamless, calculated future. A good portion of contemporary planned cities[1] emphasize their exclusivity, paired with security methods for keeping the outside world at a distance. On the occasion that these self-described enclaves transfer from renderings and pitch decks into the physical world, the land that they are built on is used as if it were a blank slate, regardless of how “blank” it truly is. They peddle enclave fantasies that displace local populations. Hence, planned cities also inherit the lineage of the suburbs, the walled compound, the gated community. They sit between grandiose, new capital construction and the micromanaged design of planned neighborhoods. What warrants closer consideration is how seamlessness of aesthetic vision and lifestyle arises from a planned city and the relationships between its constituent materials, including the physical construction site, the architectural renderings, the engineering simulations, and so on.

Take Nigeria’s planned city boom as an example. The country is no stranger to predetermined urban developments, with the capital, Abuja, being one of the most iconic examples, and Lagos having a history of new districts built on artificial land dredged from the ocean. Nigeria’s contemporary wave of planned developments has a wide range, many of them being repurposed real estate projects marketed as full cities. Eko Atlantic is one of Lagos’s planned neighborhoods, advertised as a full city independent from an older development project, Victoria Island, despite sharing a border. In development since 2013, Eko Atlantic is an active construction site slightly less than half the size of Manhattan. Emphasis on ''active'': during my time visiting Eko Atlantic, there was never a view of the horizon that was clear from tower cranes. I took many pictures from the decks of the Eko Pearl Towers, twin skyscrapers in the middle of the construction zone. The Pearl Towers include restaurants, a massive pool, and apartments for sale.
[[File:Pearltowerssky.jpg|center|frameless|600x600px]][[File:Pearltowerspool.jpg|center|frameless|600x600px]]
Eko Atlantic has embedded its construction zone within active cycles of social and commercial flows to and from Lagos. This is an act of creating seamlessness, bridging the physical gap between what remains incomplete and what has already been built, and making the concept of “incomplete” irrelevant. What has been built and opened to (rich segments of) the public functions in Lagos’s social sphere as a fully realized, high-class destination. Luxury living is made possible in Eko Atlantic through creating an aesthetic seamlessness that does not deny the physical environment’s fragmented nature, but perhaps relies on that fact of the ragged edge, the bulldozers and piles of concrete, to contrast the cosmopolitan dining and photo booths.
[[File:Pearltowers.jpg|center|frameless|600x600px]]
Creating seamlessness out of a fragmented place could be framed as a generative act, because seamlessness exists as a tangible affect solely through developers and residents successfully imprinting their desired lifestyle across the myriad layers that constitute the city. In the context of the planned city, seamlessness is truly an act of aesthetic transmutation. Writing about how planned cities achieve their aesthetic lends itself easily to “worldbuilding”/“worlding” as verbs of choice, especially in the face of their popularity in art/design scenes ever since their escape from Science Fiction and Fantasy craft terminology. However, it would be misleading to frame this seamlessness as generative without bringing attention to lives that must be displaced, destroyed, or ignored for it to come into being.

The creation of seamlessness in planned cities, which in this case is synonymous with the creation of the “illusion” of seamlessness in planned cities, is the same mechanism which coheres Fanon’s white “settlers’ town” and black “native town” into the “bifurcated” place of the colony.[2] It is an agent of displacement. The creation of seamlessness in planned cities makes violence more palatable to global media networks, like Netanyahu’s architectural pitch deck to replace the cities and lives that Israel burns to the ground in Gaza[3]; Saudi Arabia’s NEOM planned city hushing over the exploitation of construction workers and the displacement and killing of locals[4]; the displacement crises occurring across Lagos for new planned developments[5]; and the Thiel-backed “city startup,” Praxis, voicing public excitement over Trump’s threats to invade Greenland, which would secure them the land to construct their “free city” experiment based on “Arthurian myth.”[6]

To frame the creation of seamlessness in planned cities so that its ''displacement'' and ''violence'' is centered, instead of its ability to ''create'' an affect, it is useful to understand the planned city as a topology of repression. Instead of an aesthetic emerging from the constituent parts, including the people who build, work, and live there, the negative imprint of the land is what truly makes the aesthetic. A planned city that relies on terra nullius logic to justify its existence can only function by suppressing whatever may contradict its claim to the blank slate. Seamlessness is created through tight, interlocking acts of repression embedded within the material, virtual, physical, and psychosocial layers of the planned city.
----[1] “Planned cities” is one name out of many for this type of urban development. Depending on the audience and what they are trying to convey about the project, “planned cities” might be referred to as “new cities,” “smart cities,” “charter cities,” etc. I have typically referred to them as “smart cities,” mainly to emphasize the technodeterminist ethos that drive their construction. In this piece I mostly use “planned cities” to highlight these projects’ historical precedent within urban design.

[2] Frantz Fanon, “Concerning Violence.” ''The Wretched of the Earth''. (LaVergne: Grove/Atlantic, Inc., 2007).

[3] Daniel Jonas Roche, “Netanyahu unveils regional plan for “free trade zone” with trains to NEOM,” The Architect’s Newspaper, May 21<sup>st</sup> 2024, <nowiki>https://www.archpaper.com/2024/05/benjamin-netanyahu-unveils-regional-plan-free-trade-zone-rail-service-neom/</nowiki>.

[4] Human Rights Watch, ““Die First, and I’ll Pay You Later”: Saudi Arabia’s ‘Giga-Projects’ Built on Widespread Labor Abuses,” December 4<sup>th</sup> 2024, <nowiki>https://www.hrw.org/report/2024/12/04/die-first-and-ill-pay-you-later/saudi-arabias-giga-projects-built-widespread</nowiki>.

[5] Oluwafemi Olajide and Taibat Lawanson. “Urban Paradox and the Rise of the Neoliberal City: Case Study of Lagos, Nigeria.” ''Urban Studies'' 59, no. 9 (July 1, 2022): 1763–81.

[6] Praxis (@praxisnation), “How to transform Greenland into a technological powerhouse, terraforming experiment, and US strategic asset founded on Arthurian myth,” Twitter/X, January 8<sup>th</sup> 2025, <nowiki>https://x.com/praxisnation/status/1877038352412680567</nowiki>

=== References ===

[[Category:emd]]

= Comments =

Kola - Luxury Under Construction

2025-01-11T02:01:48Z

KolaHR:

<div class="metadata">
== Luxury Under Construction ==
'''Kola Heyward-Rotimi'''
</div>

The contemporary development of planned city projects, i.e. new urban environments designed from top-down and built from scratch, bears an obvious lineage with modernist projects of the 20<sup>th</sup> century like Brasilia and Chandigarh, where national aspirations were expressed via architectural schematics that promised a seamless, calculated future. A good portion of contemporary planned cities[1] emphasize their exclusivity, paired with security methods for keeping the outside world at a distance. On the occasion that these self-described enclaves transfer from renderings and pitch decks into the physical world, the land that they are built on is used as if it were a blank slate, regardless of how “blank” it truly is. They peddle enclave fantasies that displace local populations. Hence, planned cities also inherit the lineage of the suburbs, the walled compound, the gated community. They sit between grandiose, new capital construction and the micromanaged design of planned neighborhoods. What warrants closer consideration is how seamlessness of aesthetic vision and lifestyle arises from a planned city and the relationships between its constituent materials, including the physical construction site, the architectural renderings, the engineering simulations, and so on.

Take Nigeria’s planned city boom as an example. The country is no stranger to predetermined urban developments, with the capital, Abuja, being one of the most iconic examples, and Lagos having a history of new districts built on artificial land dredged from the ocean. Nigeria’s contemporary wave of planned developments has a wide range, many of them being repurposed real estate projects marketed as full cities. Eko Atlantic is one of Lagos’s planned neighborhoods, advertised as a full city independent from an older development project, Victoria Island, despite sharing a border. In development since 2013, Eko Atlantic is an active construction site slightly less than half the size of Manhattan. Emphasis on ''active'': during my time visiting Eko Atlantic, there was never a view of the horizon that was clear from tower cranes. I took many pictures from the decks of the Eko Pearl Towers, twin skyscrapers in the middle of the construction zone. The Pearl Towers include restaurants, a massive pool, and apartments on the market.
[[File:Pearltowerssky.jpg|center|frameless|600x600px]]
[[File:Pearltowerspool.jpg|center|frameless|600x600px]]
Eko Atlantic has embedded its construction zone within active cycles of social and commercial flows to and from Lagos. This is an act of creating seamlessness, bridging the physical gap between what remains incomplete and what has already been built, and making the concept of “incomplete” irrelevant. What has been built and opened to (rich segments of) the public functions in Lagos’s social sphere as a fully realized, high-class destination. Luxury living is made possible in Eko Atlantic through creating an aesthetic seamlessness that does not deny the physical environment’s fragmented nature, but perhaps relies on that fact of the ragged edge, the bulldozers and piles of concrete, to contrast the cosmopolitan dining and photo booths.
[[File:Pearltowers.jpg|center|frameless|600x600px]]
Creating seamlessness out of a fragmented place could be framed as a generative act, because seamlessness exists as a tangible affect solely through developers and residents successfully imprinting their desired lifestyle across the myriad layers that constitute the city. In the context of the planned city, seamlessness is truly an act of aesthetic transmutation. Writing about how planned cities achieve their aesthetic lends itself easily to “worldbuilding”/“worlding” as verbs of choice, especially in the face of their popularity in art/design scenes ever since their escape from Science Fiction and Fantasy craft terminology. However, it would be misleading to frame this seamlessness as generative without bringing attention to lives that must be displaced, destroyed, or ignored for it to come into being.

The creation of seamlessness in planned cities, which in this case is synonymous with the creation of the “illusion” of seamlessness in planned cities, is the same mechanism which coheres Fanon’s white “settlers’ town” and black “native town” into the “bifurcated” place of the colony.[2] It is an agent of displacement. The creation of seamlessness in planned cities makes violence more palatable to global media networks, like Netanyahu’s architectural pitch deck to replace the cities and lives that Israel burns to the ground in Gaza[3]; Saudi Arabia’s NEOM planned city hushing over the exploitation of construction workers and the displacement and killing of locals[4]; the displacement crises occurring across Lagos for new planned developments[5]; and the Thiel-backed “city startup,” Praxis, voicing public excitement over Trump’s threats to invade Greenland, which would secure them the land to construct their “free city” experiment based on “Arthurian myth.”[6]

To frame the creation of seamlessness in planned cities so that its ''displacement'' and ''violence'' is centered, instead of its ability to ''create'' an affect, it is useful to understand the planned city as a topology of repression. Instead of an aesthetic emerging from the constituent parts, including the people who build, work, and live there, the negative imprint of the land is what truly makes the aesthetic. A planned city that relies on terra nullius logic to justify its existence can only function by suppressing whatever may contradict its claim to the blank slate. Seamlessness is created through tight, interlocking acts of repression embedded within the material, virtual, physical, and psychosocial layers of the planned city.
----[1] “Planned cities” is one name out of many for this type of urban development. Depending on the audience and what they are trying to convey about the project, “planned cities” might be referred to as “new cities,” “smart cities,” “charter cities,” etc. I have typically referred to them as “smart cities,” mainly to emphasize the technodeterminist ethos that drive their construction. In this piece I mostly use “planned cities” to highlight these projects’ historical precedent within urban design.

[2] Frantz Fanon, “Concerning Violence.” ''The Wretched of the Earth''. (LaVergne: Grove/Atlantic, Inc., 2007).

[3] Daniel Jonas Roche, “Netanyahu unveils regional plan for “free trade zone” with trains to NEOM,” The Architect’s Newspaper, May 21<sup>st</sup> 2024, <nowiki>https://www.archpaper.com/2024/05/benjamin-netanyahu-unveils-regional-plan-free-trade-zone-rail-service-neom/</nowiki>.

[4] Human Rights Watch, ““Die First, and I’ll Pay You Later”: Saudi Arabia’s ‘Giga-Projects’ Built on Widespread Labor Abuses,” December 4<sup>th</sup> 2024, <nowiki>https://www.hrw.org/report/2024/12/04/die-first-and-ill-pay-you-later/saudi-arabias-giga-projects-built-widespread</nowiki>.

[5] Oluwafemi Olajide and Taibat Lawanson. “Urban Paradox and the Rise of the Neoliberal City: Case Study of Lagos, Nigeria.” ''Urban Studies'' 59, no. 9 (July 1, 2022): 1763–81.

[6] Praxis (@praxisnation), “How to transform Greenland into a technological powerhouse, terraforming experiment, and US strategic asset founded on Arthurian myth,” Twitter/X, January 8<sup>th</sup> 2025, <nowiki>https://x.com/praxisnation/status/1877038352412680567</nowiki>

=== References ===

[[Category:emd]]

= Comments =

Kola - Luxury Under Construction

2025-01-11T01:40:40Z

KolaHR:

<div class="metadata">
== Luxury Under Construction ==
'''Kola Heyward-Rotimi'''
</div>

The contemporary development of planned city projects, i.e. new urban environments designed from top-down and built from scratch, bears an obvious lineage with modernist projects of the 20<sup>th</sup> century like Brasilia and Chandigarh, where national aspirations were expressed via architectural schematics that promised a seamless, calculated future. A good portion of contemporary planned cities[1] emphasize their exclusivity, paired with security methods for keeping the outside world at a distance. On the occasion that these self-described enclaves transfer from renderings and pitch decks into the physical world, the land that they are built on is used as if it were a blank slate, regardless of how “blank” it truly is. They peddle enclave fantasies that displace local populations. Hence, planned cities also inherit the lineage of the suburbs, the walled compound, the gated community. They sit between grandiose, new capital construction and the micromanaged design of planned neighborhoods. What warrants closer consideration is how seamlessness of aesthetic vision and lifestyle arises from a planned city and the relationships between its constituent materials, including the physical construction site, the architectural renderings, the engineering simulations, and so on.

Take Nigeria’s planned city boom as an example. The country is no stranger to predetermined urban developments, with the capital, Abuja, being one of the most iconic examples, and Lagos having a history of new districts built on artificial land dredged from the ocean. Nigeria’s contemporary wave of planned developments has a wide range, many of them being repurposed real estate projects marketed as full cities. Eko Atlantic is one of Lagos’s planned neighborhoods, advertised as a full city independent from an older island development project, Victoria Island, despite sharing a beach. In development since 2013, Eko Atlantic is an active construction site slightly less than half the size of Manhattan. Emphasis on ''active'': during my time visiting Eko Atlantic, there was never a view of the horizon that was clear from tower cranes. I took many pictures from the decks of the Eko Pearl Towers, twin skyscrapers in the middle of the construction zone. The Pearl Towers include restaurants, a massive pool, and apartments on the market.
[[File:Pearltowerssky.jpg|center|frameless|600x600px]]
[[File:Pearltowerspool.jpg|center|frameless|600x600px]]
Eko Atlantic has embedded its construction zone within active cycles of social and commercial flows to and from Lagos. This is an act of creating seamlessness, bridging the physical gap between what remains incomplete and what has already been built, and making the concept of “incomplete” irrelevant. What has been built and opened to (rich segments of) the public functions in Lagos’s social sphere as a fully realized, high-class destination. Luxury living is made possible in Eko Atlantic through creating an aesthetic seamlessness that does not deny the physical environment’s fragmented nature, but perhaps relies on that fact of the ragged edge, the bulldozers and piles of concrete, to contrast the cosmopolitan dining and photo booths.
[[File:Pearltowers.jpg|center|frameless|600x600px]]
Creating seamlessness out of a fragmented place could be framed as a generative act, because seamlessness exists as a tangible affect solely through developers and residents successfully imprinting their desired lifestyle across the myriad layers that constitute the city. In the context of the planned city, seamlessness is truly an act of aesthetic transmutation. Writing about how planned cities achieve their aesthetic lends itself easily to “worldbuilding”/“worlding” as verbs of choice, especially in the face of their popularity in art/design scenes ever since their escape from Science Fiction and Fantasy craft terminology. However, it would be misleading to frame this seamlessness as generative without bringing attention to lives that must be displaced, destroyed, or ignored for it to come into being.

The creation of seamlessness in planned cities, which in this case is synonymous with the creation of the “illusion” of seamlessness in planned cities, is the same mechanism which coheres Fanon’s white “settlers’ town” and black “native town” into the “bifurcated” place of the colony.[2] It is an agent of displacement. The creation of seamlessness in planned cities makes violence more palatable to global media networks, like Netanyahu’s architectural pitch deck to replace the cities and lives that Israel burns to the ground in Gaza[3]; Saudi Arabia’s NEOM planned city hushing over the exploitation of construction workers and the displacement and killing of locals[4]; the displacement crises occurring across Lagos for new planned developments[5]; and the Thiel-backed “city startup,” Praxis, voicing public excitement over Trump’s threats to invade Greenland, which would secure them the land to construct their “free city” experiment based on “Arthurian myth.”[6]

To frame the creation of seamlessness in planned cities so that its ''displacement'' and ''violence'' is centered, instead of its ability to ''create'' an affect, it is useful to understand the planned city as a topology of repression. Instead of an aesthetic emerging from the constituent parts, including the people who build, work, and live there, the negative imprint of the land is what truly makes the aesthetic. A planned city that relies on terra nullius logic to justify its existence can only function by suppressing whatever may contradict its claim to the blank slate. Seamlessness is created through tight, interlocking acts of repression embedded within the material, virtual, physical, and psychosocial layers of the planned city.
----[1] “Planned cities” is one name out of many for this type of urban development. Depending on the audience and what they are trying to convey about the project, “planned cities” might be referred to as “new cities,” “smart cities,” “charter cities,” etc. I have typically referred to them as “smart cities,” mainly to emphasize the technodeterminist ethos that drive their construction. In this piece I mostly use “planned cities” to highlight these projects’ historical precedent within urban design.

[2] Frantz Fanon, “Concerning Violence.” ''The Wretched of the Earth''. (LaVergne: Grove/Atlantic, Inc., 2007).

[3] Daniel Jonas Roche, “Netanyahu unveils regional plan for “free trade zone” with trains to NEOM,” The Architect’s Newspaper, May 21<sup>st</sup> 2024, <nowiki>https://www.archpaper.com/2024/05/benjamin-netanyahu-unveils-regional-plan-free-trade-zone-rail-service-neom/</nowiki>.

[4] Human Rights Watch, ““Die First, and I’ll Pay You Later”: Saudi Arabia’s ‘Giga-Projects’ Built on Widespread Labor Abuses,” December 4<sup>th</sup> 2024, <nowiki>https://www.hrw.org/report/2024/12/04/die-first-and-ill-pay-you-later/saudi-arabias-giga-projects-built-widespread</nowiki>.

[5] Oluwafemi Olajide and Taibat Lawanson. “Urban Paradox and the Rise of the Neoliberal City: Case Study of Lagos, Nigeria.” ''Urban Studies'' 59, no. 9 (July 1, 2022): 1763–81.

[6] Praxis (@praxisnation), “How to transform Greenland into a technological powerhouse, terraforming experiment, and US strategic asset founded on Arthurian myth,” Twitter/X, January 8<sup>th</sup> 2025, <nowiki>https://x.com/praxisnation/status/1877038352412680567</nowiki>

=== References ===

[[Category:emd]]

= Comments =

File:Pearltowerssky.jpg

2025-01-11T01:39:56Z

KolaHR:

A picture of the Eko Pearl Towers.

Kola - Luxury Under Construction

2025-01-11T01:34:59Z

KolaHR:

<div class="metadata">
== Luxury Under Construction ==
'''Kola Heyward-Rotimi'''
</div>

The contemporary development of planned city projects, i.e. new urban environments designed from top-down and built from scratch, bears an obvious lineage with modernist projects of the 20<sup>th</sup> century like Brasilia and Chandigarh, where national aspirations were expressed via architectural schematics that promised a seamless, calculated future. A good portion of contemporary planned cities[1] emphasize their exclusivity, paired with security methods for keeping the outside world at a distance. On the occasion that these self-described enclaves transfer from renderings and pitch decks into the physical world, the land that they are built on is used as if it were a blank slate, regardless of how “blank” it truly is. They peddle enclave fantasies that displace local populations. Hence, planned cities also inherit the lineage of the suburbs, the walled compound, the gated community. They sit between grandiose, new capital construction and the micromanaged design of planned neighborhoods. What warrants closer consideration is how seamlessness of aesthetic vision and lifestyle arises from a planned city and the relationships between its constituent materials, including the physical construction site, the architectural renderings, the engineering simulations, and so on.

Take Nigeria’s planned city boom as an example. The country is no stranger to predetermined urban developments, with the capital, Abuja, being one of the most iconic examples, and Lagos having a history of new districts built on artificial land dredged from the ocean. Nigeria’s contemporary wave of planned developments has a wide range, many of them being repurposed real estate projects marketed as full cities. Eko Atlantic is one of Lagos’s planned neighborhoods, advertised as a full city independent from an older island development project, Victoria Island, despite sharing a beach. In development since 2013, Eko Atlantic is an active construction site slightly less than half the size of Manhattan. Emphasis on ''active'': during my time visiting Eko Atlantic, there was never a view of the horizon that was clear from tower cranes. I took many pictures from the decks of the Eko Pearl Towers, twin skyscrapers in the middle of the construction zone. The Pearl Towers include restaurants, a massive pool, and apartments on the market.
[[File:Pearltowerspool.jpg|center|frameless|600x600px]]
Eko Atlantic has embedded its construction zone within active cycles of social and commercial flows to and from Lagos. This is an act of creating seamlessness, bridging the physical gap between what remains incomplete and what has already been built, and making the concept of “incomplete” irrelevant. What has been built and opened to (rich segments of) the public functions in Lagos’s social sphere as a fully realized, high-class destination. Luxury living is made possible in Eko Atlantic through creating an aesthetic seamlessness that does not deny the physical environment’s fragmented nature, but perhaps relies on that fact of the ragged edge, the bulldozers and piles of concrete, to contrast the cosmopolitan dining and photo booths.
[[File:Pearltowers.jpg|center|frameless|600x600px]]
Creating seamlessness out of a fragmented place could be framed as a generative act, because seamlessness exists as a tangible affect solely through developers and residents successfully imprinting their desired lifestyle across the myriad layers that constitute the city. In the context of the planned city, seamlessness is truly an act of aesthetic transmutation. Writing about how planned cities achieve their aesthetic lends itself easily to “worldbuilding”/“worlding” as verbs of choice, especially in the face of their popularity in art/design scenes ever since their escape from Science Fiction and Fantasy craft terminology. However, it would be misleading to frame this seamlessness as generative without bringing attention to lives that must be displaced, destroyed, or ignored for it to come into being.

The creation of seamlessness in planned cities, which in this case is synonymous with the creation of the “illusion” of seamlessness in planned cities, is the same mechanism which coheres Fanon’s white “settlers’ town” and black “native town” into the “bifurcated” place of the colony.[2] It is an agent of displacement. The creation of seamlessness in planned cities makes violence more palatable to global media networks, like Netanyahu’s architectural pitch deck to replace the cities and lives that Israel burns to the ground in Gaza[3]; Saudi Arabia’s NEOM planned city hushing over the exploitation of construction workers and the displacement and killing of locals[4]; the displacement crises occurring across Lagos for new planned developments[5]; and the Thiel-backed “city startup,” Praxis, voicing public excitement over Trump’s threats to invade Greenland, which would secure them the land to construct their “free city” experiment based on “Arthurian myth.”[6]

To frame the creation of seamlessness in planned cities so that its ''displacement'' and ''violence'' is centered, instead of its ability to ''create'' an affect, it is useful to understand the planned city as a topology of repression. Instead of an aesthetic emerging from the constituent parts, including the people who build, work, and live there, the negative imprint of the land is what truly makes the aesthetic. A planned city that relies on terra nullius logic to justify its existence can only function by suppressing whatever may contradict its claim to the blank slate. Seamlessness is created through tight, interlocking acts of repression embedded within the material, virtual, physical, and psychosocial layers of the planned city.
----[1] “Planned cities” is one name out of many for this type of urban development. Depending on the audience and what they are trying to convey about the project, “planned cities” might be referred to as “new cities,” “smart cities,” “charter cities,” etc. I have typically referred to them as “smart cities,” mainly to emphasize the technodeterminist ethos that drive their construction. In this piece I mostly use “planned cities” to highlight these projects’ historical precedent within urban design.

[2] Frantz Fanon, “Concerning Violence.” ''The Wretched of the Earth''. (LaVergne: Grove/Atlantic, Inc., 2007).

[3] Daniel Jonas Roche, “Netanyahu unveils regional plan for “free trade zone” with trains to NEOM,” The Architect’s Newspaper, May 21<sup>st</sup> 2024, <nowiki>https://www.archpaper.com/2024/05/benjamin-netanyahu-unveils-regional-plan-free-trade-zone-rail-service-neom/</nowiki>.

[4] Human Rights Watch, ““Die First, and I’ll Pay You Later”: Saudi Arabia’s ‘Giga-Projects’ Built on Widespread Labor Abuses,” December 4<sup>th</sup> 2024, <nowiki>https://www.hrw.org/report/2024/12/04/die-first-and-ill-pay-you-later/saudi-arabias-giga-projects-built-widespread</nowiki>.

[5] Oluwafemi Olajide and Taibat Lawanson. “Urban Paradox and the Rise of the Neoliberal City: Case Study of Lagos, Nigeria.” ''Urban Studies'' 59, no. 9 (July 1, 2022): 1763–81.

[6] Praxis (@praxisnation), “How to transform Greenland into a technological powerhouse, terraforming experiment, and US strategic asset founded on Arthurian myth,” Twitter/X, January 8<sup>th</sup> 2025, <nowiki>https://x.com/praxisnation/status/1877038352412680567</nowiki>

=== References ===

[[Category:emd]]

= Comments =

File:Pearltowerspool.jpg

2025-01-11T01:33:11Z

KolaHR:

A pool at the Eko Pearl Towers.

Kola - Luxury Under Construction

2025-01-11T01:22:34Z

KolaHR:

<div class="metadata">
== Luxury Under Construction ==
'''Kola Heyward-Rotimi'''
</div>

The contemporary development of planned city projects, i.e. new urban environments designed from top-down and built from scratch, bears an obvious lineage with modernist projects of the 20<sup>th</sup> century like Brasilia and Chandigarh, where national aspirations were expressed via architectural schematics that promised a seamless, calculated future. A good portion of contemporary planned cities[1] emphasize their exclusivity, paired with security methods for keeping the outside world at a distance. On the occasion that these self-described enclaves transfer from renderings and pitch decks into the physical world, the land that they are built on is used as if it were a blank slate, regardless of how “blank” it truly is. They peddle enclave fantasies that displace local populations. Hence, planned cities also inherit the lineage of the suburbs, the walled compound, the gated community. They sit between grandiose, new capital construction and the micromanaged design of planned neighborhoods. What warrants closer consideration is how seamlessness of aesthetic vision and lifestyle arises from a planned city and the relationships between its constituent materials, including the physical construction site, the architectural renderings, the engineering simulations, and so on.

Take Nigeria’s planned city boom as an example. The country is no stranger to predetermined urban developments, with the capital, Abuja, being one of the most iconic examples, and Lagos having a history of new districts built on artificial land dredged from the ocean. Nigeria’s contemporary wave of planned developments has a wide range, many of them being repurposed real estate projects marketed as full cities. Eko Atlantic is one of Lagos’s planned neighborhoods, advertised as a full city independent from an older island development project, Victoria Island, despite sharing a beach. In development since 2013, Eko Atlantic is an active construction site slightly less than half the size of Manhattan. Emphasis on ''active'': during my time visiting Eko Atlantic, there was never a view of the horizon that was clear from tower cranes. I took many pictures from the decks of the Eko Pearl Towers, twin skyscrapers in the middle of the construction zone. The Pearl Towers include restaurants, a massive pool, and apartments on the market.

Eko Atlantic has embedded its construction zone within active cycles of social and commercial flows to and from Lagos. This is an act of creating seamlessness, bridging the physical gap between what remains incomplete and what has already been built, and making the concept of “incomplete” irrelevant. What has been built and opened to (rich segments of) the public functions in Lagos’s social sphere as a fully realized, high-class destination. Luxury living is made possible in Eko Atlantic through creating an aesthetic seamlessness that does not deny the physical environment’s fragmented nature, but perhaps relies on that fact of the ragged edge, the bulldozers and piles of concrete, to contrast the cosmopolitan dining and photo booths.
[[File:Pearltowers.jpg|center|frameless|600x600px]]
Creating seamlessness out of a fragmented place could be framed as a generative act, because seamlessness exists as a tangible affect solely through developers and residents successfully imprinting their desired lifestyle across the myriad layers that constitute the city. In the context of the planned city, seamlessness is truly an act of aesthetic transmutation. Writing about how planned cities achieve their aesthetic lends itself easily to “worldbuilding”/“worlding” as verbs of choice, especially in the face of their popularity in art/design scenes ever since their escape from Science Fiction and Fantasy craft terminology. However, it would be misleading to frame this seamlessness as generative without bringing attention to lives that must be displaced, destroyed, or ignored for it to come into being.

The creation of seamlessness in planned cities, which in this case is synonymous with the creation of the “illusion” of seamlessness in planned cities, is the same mechanism which coheres Fanon’s white “settlers’ town” and black “native town” into the “bifurcated” place of the colony.[2] It is an agent of displacement. The creation of seamlessness in planned cities makes violence more palatable to global media networks, like Netanyahu’s architectural pitch deck to replace the cities and lives that Israel burns to the ground in Gaza[3]; Saudi Arabia’s NEOM planned city hushing over the exploitation of construction workers and the displacement and killing of locals[4]; the displacement crises occurring across Lagos for new planned developments[5]; and the Thiel-backed “city startup,” Praxis, voicing public excitement over Trump’s threats to invade Greenland, which would secure them the land to construct their “free city” experiment based on “Arthurian myth.”[6]

To frame the creation of seamlessness in planned cities so that its ''displacement'' and ''violence'' is centered, instead of its ability to ''create'' an affect, it is useful to understand the planned city as a topology of repression. Instead of an aesthetic emerging from the constituent parts, including the people who build, work, and live there, the negative imprint of the land is what truly makes the aesthetic. A planned city that relies on terra nullius logic to justify its existence can only function by suppressing whatever may contradict its claim to the blank slate. Seamlessness is created through tight, interlocking acts of repression embedded within the material, virtual, physical, and psychosocial layers of the planned city.
----[1] “Planned cities” is one name out of many for this type of urban development. Depending on the audience and what they are trying to convey about the project, “planned cities” might be referred to as “new cities,” “smart cities,” “charter cities,” etc. I have typically referred to them as “smart cities,” mainly to emphasize the technodeterminist ethos that drive their construction. In this piece I mostly use “planned cities” to highlight these projects’ historical precedent within urban design.

[2] Frantz Fanon, “Concerning Violence.” ''The Wretched of the Earth''. (LaVergne: Grove/Atlantic, Inc., 2007).

[3] Daniel Jonas Roche, “Netanyahu unveils regional plan for “free trade zone” with trains to NEOM,” The Architect’s Newspaper, May 21<sup>st</sup> 2024, <nowiki>https://www.archpaper.com/2024/05/benjamin-netanyahu-unveils-regional-plan-free-trade-zone-rail-service-neom/</nowiki>.

[4] Human Rights Watch, ““Die First, and I’ll Pay You Later”: Saudi Arabia’s ‘Giga-Projects’ Built on Widespread Labor Abuses,” December 4<sup>th</sup> 2024, <nowiki>https://www.hrw.org/report/2024/12/04/die-first-and-ill-pay-you-later/saudi-arabias-giga-projects-built-widespread</nowiki>.

[5] Oluwafemi Olajide and Taibat Lawanson. “Urban Paradox and the Rise of the Neoliberal City: Case Study of Lagos, Nigeria.” ''Urban Studies'' 59, no. 9 (July 1, 2022): 1763–81.

[6] Praxis (@praxisnation), “How to transform Greenland into a technological powerhouse, terraforming experiment, and US strategic asset founded on Arthurian myth,” Twitter/X, January 8<sup>th</sup> 2025, <nowiki>https://x.com/praxisnation/status/1877038352412680567</nowiki>

=== References ===

[[Category:emd]]

= Comments =

Kola - Luxury Under Construction

2025-01-11T01:20:51Z

KolaHR: Created page with "<div class="metadata"> == Luxury Under Construction == '''Kola Heyward-Rotimi''' </div> The contemporary development of planned city projects, i.e. new urban environments designed from top-down and built from scratch, bears an obvious lineage with modernist projects of the 20<sup>th</sup> century like Brasilia and Chandigarh, where national aspirations were expressed via architectural schematics that promised a seamless, calculated future. A good portion of contemporary..."

<div class="metadata">
== Luxury Under Construction ==
'''Kola Heyward-Rotimi'''
</div>

The contemporary development of planned city projects, i.e. new urban environments designed from top-down and built from scratch, bears an obvious lineage with modernist projects of the 20<sup>th</sup> century like Brasilia and Chandigarh, where national aspirations were expressed via architectural schematics that promised a seamless, calculated future. A good portion of contemporary planned cities[1] emphasize their exclusivity, paired with security methods for keeping the outside world at a distance. On the occasion that these self-described enclaves transfer from renderings and pitch decks into the physical world, the land that they are built on is used as if it were a blank slate, regardless of how “blank” it truly is. They peddle enclave fantasies that displace local populations. Hence, planned cities also inherit the lineage of the suburbs, the walled compound, the gated community. They sit between grandiose, new capital construction and the micromanaged design of planned neighborhoods. What warrants closer consideration is how seamlessness of aesthetic vision and lifestyle arises from a planned city and the relationships between its constituent materials, including the physical construction site, the architectural renderings, the engineering simulations, and so on.

Take Nigeria’s planned city boom as an example. The country is no stranger to predetermined urban developments, with the capital, Abuja, being one of the most iconic examples, and Lagos having a history of new districts built on artificial land dredged from the ocean. Nigeria’s contemporary wave of planned developments has a wide range, many of them being repurposed real estate projects marketed as full cities. Eko Atlantic is one of Lagos’s planned neighborhoods, advertised as a full city separate from an older island development project, Victoria Island, despite sharing a beach. In development since 2013, Eko Atlantic is an active construction site slightly less than half the size of Manhattan. Emphasis on ''active'': during my time visiting Eko Atlantic, there was never a view of the horizon that was clear from tower cranes. I took many pictures from the decks of the Eko Pearl Towers, twin skyscrapers in the middle of the construction zone. The Pearl Towers include restaurants, a massive pool, and apartments on the market.

Eko Atlantic has embedded its construction zone within active cycles of social and commercial flows to and from Lagos. This is an act of creating seamlessness, bridging the physical gap between what remains incomplete and what has already been built, and making the concept of “incomplete” irrelevant. What has been built and opened to (rich segments of) the public functions in Lagos’s social sphere as a fully realized, high-class destination. Luxury living is made possible in Eko Atlantic through creating an aesthetic seamlessness that does not deny the physical environment’s fragmented nature, but perhaps relies on that fact of the ragged edge, the bulldozers and piles of concrete, to contrast the cosmopolitan dining and photo booths.
[[File:Pearltowers.jpg|center|frameless|600x600px]]
Creating seamlessness out of a fragmented place could be framed as a generative act, because seamlessness exists as a tangible affect solely through developers and residents successfully imprinting their desired lifestyle across the myriad layers that constitute the city. In the context of the planned city, seamlessness is truly an act of aesthetic transmutation. Writing about how planned cities achieve their aesthetic lends itself easily to “worldbuilding”/“worlding” as verbs of choice, especially in the face of their popularity in art/design scenes ever since their escape from Science Fiction and Fantasy craft terminology. However, it would be misleading to frame this seamlessness as generative without bringing attention to lives that must be displaced, destroyed, or ignored for it to come into being.

The creation of seamlessness in planned cities, which in this case is synonymous with the creation of the “illusion” of seamlessness in planned cities, is the same mechanism which coheres Fanon’s white “settlers’ town” and black “native town” into the “bifurcated” place of the colony.[2] It is an agent of displacement. The creation of seamlessness in planned cities makes violence more palatable to global media networks, like Netanyahu’s architectural pitch deck to replace the cities and lives that Israel burns to the ground in Gaza[3]; Saudi Arabia’s NEOM planned city hushing over the exploitation of construction workers and the displacement and killing of locals[4]; the displacement crises occurring across Lagos for new planned developments[5]; and the Thiel-backed “city startup,” Praxis, voicing public excitement over Trump’s threats to invade Greenland, which would secure them the land to construct their “free city” experiment based on “Arthurian myth.”[6]

To frame the creation of seamlessness in planned cities so that its ''displacement'' and ''violence'' is centered, instead of its ability to ''create'' an affect, it is useful to understand the planned city as a topology of repression. Instead of an aesthetic emerging from the constituent parts, including the people who build, work, and live there, the negative imprint of the land is what truly makes the aesthetic. A planned city that relies on terra nullius logic to justify its existence can only function by suppressing whatever may contradict its claim to the blank slate. Seamlessness is created through tight, interlocking acts of repression embedded within the material, virtual, physical, and psychosocial layers of the planned city.
----[1] “Planned cities” is one name out of many for this type of urban development. Depending on the audience and what they are trying to convey about the project, “planned cities” might be referred to as “new cities,” “smart cities,” “charter cities,” etc. I have typically referred to them as “smart cities,” mainly to emphasize the technodeterminist ethos that drive their construction. In this piece I mostly use “planned cities” to highlight these projects’ historical precedent within urban design.

[2] Frantz Fanon, “Concerning Violence.” ''The Wretched of the Earth''. (LaVergne: Grove/Atlantic, Inc., 2007).

[3] Daniel Jonas Roche, “Netanyahu unveils regional plan for “free trade zone” with trains to NEOM,” The Architect’s Newspaper, May 21<sup>st</sup> 2024, <nowiki>https://www.archpaper.com/2024/05/benjamin-netanyahu-unveils-regional-plan-free-trade-zone-rail-service-neom/</nowiki>.

[4] Human Rights Watch, ““Die First, and I’ll Pay You Later”: Saudi Arabia’s ‘Giga-Projects’ Built on Widespread Labor Abuses,” December 4<sup>th</sup> 2024, <nowiki>https://www.hrw.org/report/2024/12/04/die-first-and-ill-pay-you-later/saudi-arabias-giga-projects-built-widespread</nowiki>.

[5] Oluwafemi Olajide and Taibat Lawanson. “Urban Paradox and the Rise of the Neoliberal City: Case Study of Lagos, Nigeria.” ''Urban Studies'' 59, no. 9 (July 1, 2022): 1763–81.

[6] Praxis (@praxisnation), “How to transform Greenland into a technological powerhouse, terraforming experiment, and US strategic asset founded on Arthurian myth,” Twitter/X, January 8<sup>th</sup> 2025, <nowiki>https://x.com/praxisnation/status/1877038352412680567</nowiki>

=== References ===

[[Category:emd]]

= Comments =

File:Pearltowers.jpg

2025-01-10T20:54:56Z

KolaHR:

A picture of the Eko Pearl Towers from afar.