Kola - Luxury Under Construction

“One question we get a lot is when will Eko Atlantic City be ready? Well the answer is: today!” 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, 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?

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.”

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. 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, 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."

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.

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