Jagaban’s Guide To Building A City
I had had too much wine with my defunct reading club a couple of years ago, when I spontaneously prefixed Abidin Kusno’s Rethinking the Nation essay with a question: are Architects Rethinking the Nation or Politicians are? Of course it is easy to agree that politicians are. That question marked the beginning of an exploration that I now cannot resist.
So my first post is dedicated to 2 sets of people: first, those politicians who like Asa’s famous ‘tomorrow is a politician’s today’ line in No One Knows have been shaping our thought life from 1960 to 2019 ….and second, architects who are formally trained in creative problem solving but have become apolitical and out-of-touch, merely dealing with issues of “form, colour and texture” and have robbed the nation of their/architecture’s potential to think and build both in the material and immaterial.
If we look at how the ruling APC have begun applying the development template of Lagos to Nigeria, and study the flows of capital, politics and power; it is hard to disagree that Lagos is indeed now teaching Nigeria (I will write about this in another blog). The patterns of building Lagos both materially and immaterially are being replicated at the center: there is now an emphasis on widening tax base, on deficit spending on infrastructure, and seeing Nigeria as business case, which is not a bad thing in itself. Because of these adaptations, I am tempted to author Jagaban’s Guide To Building A City, not as a compliment to this important politician, but as a tongue-in-cheek critique of the intersection of architecture, urbanism, politics and capital in Lagos and Nigeria. Architecture cannot therefore afford to play on the fringes, because such studies can help us predict the pattern of future projects (yea, and that’s business intelligence for the big firms too) and perhaps the shape of places to come. Will Nigeria’s cities begin to think like Lagos? Will they also copy and paste? And if they do, what images are we likely to see? What city attitudes are going to be born? At its full blown stage, I hope that we can pin down these flows and begin to navigate within it.
At the very base of applying the lessons of the city to the nation — in this case Lagos’ to Nigeria — is the fact that traditional politicians like Jagaban recognize the primacy of thought in building a nation. They paint images from a palette of traditionally established choices, they have their moves: they own newspapers to shape thought everyday, they write books ahead of elections, they talk adoringly about the beauty or intelligence of a wife to win the women vote, they read books openly with children, they high-five a kid for the gram, they eat in rundown shacks with the proletariat, they roll up their sleeves on working visits, they equate the kidnapping of schoolchildren with the loss of a childhood friend they never saw again, they throw in their native name on campaign posters to woo locals, and most of all they have a catchy slogan. Call me naive, I also want to play that field, in this case as an intellectual opportunist.
So here are my 2 moves for Architecture As Politics
- Start With the Material
Following Jagaban’s lead, I’d start with Lagos. Lagosians are already ticked by certain issues where architecture is implicated in the flows of capital and politics. So if politicians can create #LockedParks in Lagos, I will interpret it to you as exclusion of the proletariat, if they can hand the shorelines of Ozumba Mbadiwe and Awolowo Road to private hands so much that Ikoyi isn’t visible from Victoria Island anymore I will argue it as#AutocracyofTheView, when they promote Eko Atlantic I will engage other architects who know more about environmental issues to talk about #ExpectFlooding. When #Elections come and they want to quickly hand us gifts in form of panic projects: infrastructure or buildings, we will be ready to predict what Nigerians should expect. At other times, we will write in great detail about those #HyperbolicProjects, you know them: those boreholes that are called ultra-modern, like what is ultra-modern about a borehole, or Kate Owoko’s floating toilet’ and #WhiteElephants that are more of ego-trips. We are going to accept Samuel Mockbee’s challenge to engage in policymaking.
“Architects need to play a direct role in the policy-making in a community, once a decision has been made and handed to the architect, it is too late. After all, the role of any artist is to help people see things as they truly are” — S Mockbee
Once we unpack these, we will enter the realm of utopias, visions and then the immaterial, where architecture engages collective thought at a very abstract level.
2. Swim in the Immaterial
Once we achieve some success with the material, we will swim in the ‘architectural thinking’ realm. The nation already has a shared meaning of architecture, if not why does Vice President Osinbajo refer to the “security architecture of our country” in his speeches, or why do we have event managers refer to themselves as “event architects”. We are going to focus on narrative, story-telling techniques not technical jargon and hope that our visualized thought, surrealist agitprop images will help both politicians and architects navigate the collective aspirations of Nigerians and perhaps Africans.
