Lagoon

Abstract

Abstract Lagos’s urban landscapes underwent profound changes in the years around Nigeria’s 1960 independence as the city expanded and officials embarked on plans to raze established neighborhoods to construct a modern skyline. This article examines these landscapes and the people and histories they were designed to hold and privilege across decolonization. Through a reading of historical images alongside the writings of architects and urban planners from the era, it argues that the devaluation of history was central to the Tropical Modernist architectural ideologies driving these planning interventions. The forward-looking visions behind the work of Maxwell Fry, Jane Drew, and other modernists were convenient for the British Colonial Office, allowing it to contort a century of imperial neglect and marginalization of places like Lagos Island into the justification for continued and expanded rule as it promised to edify the undeveloped African sections of the city into modern urban spaces. Skylines replaced skin tone as the acceptable markers of progress as architects helped the colonial state reinvent its rationale in the face of independence demands. The article suggests that records of changing urban landscapes offer an archive for insights into the historical production and reproduction of knowledge across independence in Nigeria and elsewhere, and the role that planners, politics, and housing played in the elevation of an image of “rural” Africa.