Lagos’ population is expected to reach 24 million people by 2020, which would make it the third largest city in the world. Every hour, 21 new inhabitants set out to start a life in the city, a life that is highly unpredictable and requires risk taking, networking and improvisation as essential strategies for survival.

Parsons the New School will be collaborating with Nigerian stakeholders to design the best possible architectural, educational, and agricultural model for innovative learning at multiple scales. Our mission is to integrate, innovate, learn and collaborate with local communities to inspire progressive spaces for nurturing knowledge through the building of relation, for communities in need.
ships, network, and architecture in Africa. The ultimate beneficiaries will be the children of Nigeria and their communities. We hope to ignite a network of work forces, design initiatives collaborations between Lagos State, the Parsons School of Constructed Environments.

Mindful of the value of indigenous knowledge and expertise; our design studio will respect and research local values and methods of working in Lagos, Nigeria. We will take this as a starting point for meeting the challenges environments using realistic resources, working directly with local stakeholders – families, communities, and local organisations. We are intensely committed to providing well researched and documented information about Nigerian culture, from religion, and social environment, to political and ecological tensions. This research will preface designs for Lagos to create more responsive, holistic and strategic opportunities for land remediation, civic constitution, and social economy.

Key to understanding a city such as Lagos is the realization that it is not the controllable result of Western planning. The city should be seen as an anarchic organism in which the enterprise of the inhabitants turns any apparent disadvantage into an advantage: “Anguish over the city’s shortcomings in traditional urban systems obscures the reasons for the continued, exuberant existence of Lagos and other megacities like it. These shortcomings have generated ingenious, critical alternative systems.”
-Rem Koolhaus, LAGOS/KOOLHAUS, film Written and Directed by Bregtje van der Haak. Produced by Sylvia Baan for Pieter van Huystee Film