Kola - Luxury Under Construction
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 20th 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.
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 21st 2024, https://www.archpaper.com/2024/05/benjamin-netanyahu-unveils-regional-plan-free-trade-zone-rail-service-neom/.
[4] Human Rights Watch, ““Die First, and I’ll Pay You Later”: Saudi Arabia’s ‘Giga-Projects’ Built on Widespread Labor Abuses,” December 4th 2024, https://www.hrw.org/report/2024/12/04/die-first-and-ill-pay-you-later/saudi-arabias-giga-projects-built-widespread.
[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 8th 2025, https://x.com/praxisnation/status/1877038352412680567
