Location: Lagos, Nigeria

How does architecture navigate a failing utopia? Lagos’s pursuit of an ideal image and by extent, its performance of progress, has turned its peripheries into major sites of loss. In a bid to progress, city-doubles are created through heavy land reclamation, resulting in enclaves which privilege the identity of the city as a product as opposed to an inhabitable space for the collective. In a bid to progress, Lagos seeks a tabula rasa, an escape from existing urban problems and strife, an ideal image which opposes the logic of the existing city. Yet the ideal image remains unattainable, as utopia is forced to confront the intricacies of the world’s economic system and the perfect conditions which hold up the ideology disintegrate, leaving reclaimed cities in stall – unbuilt, unoccupied.

Located on the periphery of Lagos, Eko Atlantic City (EAC) stands as the city’s most ambitious urban vision and arguably its biggest failure yet. This thesis confronts failure or the state of failing as a site for reconstruction, by reconciling spatial artefacts intrinsic to the existing city’s quotidian life with the infrastructural ghosts of stalled urban visions. In doing so, it explores the organization of market spaces around, within, and astride the remnants of EAC. Ultimately, it makes space for Lagosians at the edge of their city.