Overview

Waterhouses is about the places the people of Lagos have inhabited, imagined, and made home for the past two centuries. It asks what a house in Lagos is and explores how the answer to that question has been historically constructed and reconstructed in turn with the city's changing landscapes. Written for historians of African and Atlantic history, scholars and practitioners of urbanism, and anyone looking to make sense of Africa's most populous metropolis today, the book is an approachable history of how houses and water have formed modern Lagos. The book argues that in the coastlands from which Lagos rose, housing architectures were the single most important social, material, and political instruments for people hoping to contour the city's landscapes-both its ecology and its image-and its historical course. The forms and meanings of houses in Lagos have shifted dramatically over time and in ways that reveal how power, house making, visual perception, and the environment are entangled in modern cities. The book's chapters encompass six eras and six waterscapes: sandbars, canals, swamps, lagoons, oceans, and floods. These spaces guide the book's exploration of how people saw and attempted to remake Lagos's environs in a process that invariably involved housing architectures. At its core, Lagos is a city built through the materials, relations, and powers contained in the dry, solid, and hospitable spaces of homes, which have long been scarce and culturally celebrated resources in the city's water-constricted setting. While shelter is integral to any city's development, houses have been particularly important and sought after in Lagos because of the city's land shortages and because of the societal influence and physical footprint of traditional Yoruba ile (family compounds), in which activities were historically organized and centered. Through dozens of maps, photographs, and housing plans found in British and Nigerian archives, this book traces the relationship between Lagos's residential spaces and its urban landscapes across the rise, fall, and aftermath of British colonization. By showing how Yoruba visions of home-though often forgotten or misunderstood today-coexisted with European notions, Waterhouses offers urban planners, policy makers, and architects ideas for how the definingly human act of inhabiting a place might be grounded in practices of continuous custodianship rather than extractive possession.

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9780896803312

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Reviews

This is one of the most engaging studies of Lagos I have read in some time, and I read a lot of work on Lagos. Its focus is on houses and landscapes, how each has been imagined, inhabited, governed, struggled over, and valued in every sense of the word. The book draws attention to the overlooked quotidian; it traces how deeply politicized houses and landscapes have been in Lagos since the colonial period, and how the legacies of the colonial upheavals regarding concepts of African homes and landscapes have been compounded through the eras of political independence, petrocapitalism, and now neoliberalism. -- Abosede George, Barnard College and Columbia University

"This is one of the most engaging studies of Lagos I have read in some time, and I read a lot of work on Lagos. Its focus is on houses and landscapes, how each has been imagined, inhabited, governed, struggled over, and valued in every sense of the word. The book draws attention to the overlooked quotidian; it traces how deeply politicized houses and landscapes have been in Lagos since the colonial period, and how the legacies of the colonial upheavals regarding concepts of African homes and landscapes have been compounded through the eras of political independence, petrocapitalism, and now neoliberalism.', Abosede George, Barnard College and Columbia University 'Waterhouses burrows beneath and goes beyond the superficial physical or financial representations of houses in Lagos to unveil their contextual meanings, forms, and usage over the longue dur�e. This is a historically grounded, sensitively nuanced, and pathbreaking rereading of the visual archives--maps, building plans, photographs, archival documents, newspapers--aided by oral sources and lived experience. Mark Duerksenunpacks layers and dimensions of embedded history, politics, economics, power relations, planning, and architecture of the diverse physical structures and the watery terrainof a sandbank city lying precariously above sea level.', Ayodeji Olukoju, University of Lagos ""Waterhouses burrows beneath and goes beyond the superficial physical or financial representations of houses in Lagos to unveil their contextual meanings, forms, and usage over the longue dur�e. This is a historically grounded, sensitively nuanced, and path-breaking rereading of the visual archives--maps, building plans, photographs, archival documents, newspapers--aided by oral sources and lived experience. Mark Duerksenunpacks layers and dimensions of embedded history, politics, economics, power relations, planning, and architecture of the diverse physical structures and the watery terrainof a sandbank city lying precariously above sea level.""--Ayodeji Olukoju, University of Lagos"

This is one of the most engaging studies of Lagos I have read in some time, and I read a lot of work on Lagos. Its focus is on houses and landscapes, how each has been imagined, inhabited, governed, struggled over, and valued in every sense of the word. The book draws attention to the overlooked quotidian; it traces how deeply politicized houses and landscapes have been in Lagos since the colonial period, and how the legacies of the colonial upheavals regarding concepts of African homes and landscapes have been compounded through the eras of political independence, petrocapitalism, and now neoliberalism.', Abosede George, Barnard College and Columbia University 'Waterhouses burrows beneath and goes beyond the superficial physical or financial representations of houses in Lagos to unveil their contextual meanings, forms, and usage over the longue dur�e. This is a historically grounded, sensitively nuanced, and pathbreaking rereading of the visual archives--maps, building plans, photographs, archival documents, newspapers--aided by oral sources and lived experience. Mark Duerksenunpacks layers and dimensions of embedded history, politics, economics, power relations, planning, and architecture of the diverse physical structures and the watery terrainof a sandbank city lying precariously above sea level.', Ayodeji Olukoju, University of Lagos ""Waterhouses burrows beneath and goes beyond the superficial physical or financial representations of houses in Lagos to unveil their contextual meanings, forms, and usage over the longue dur�e. This is a historically grounded, sensitively nuanced, and path-breaking rereading of the visual archives--maps, building plans, photographs, archival documents, newspapers--aided by oral sources and lived experience. Mark Duerksenunpacks layers and dimensions of embedded history, politics, economics, power relations, planning, and architecture of the diverse physical structures and the watery terrainof a sandbank city lying precariously above sea level.""--Ayodeji Olukoju, University of Lagos

Author Information

Mark Duerksen is a research associate at the Africa Center for Strategic Studies in Washington, DC. His work has appeared in the Journal of West African History and the Johannesburg Salon, as well as in dozens of publications for the Africa Center. His work aims to make Africa’s histories and cities understandable (and visible) to a larger audience, particularly policymakers.

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