“Abuja Nigeria: The Paradox of Designing and Building for Peace in the Age of Provincial Rebellions”

Blog Post: 21 March 2019

Lecture by Dr. Nnamdi Elleh, Head of the School of Architecture and Planning, Wits University

Professor Nnamdi Elleh’s lecture “Abuja Nigeria: The Paradox of Designing and Building for Peace in the Age of Provincial Rebellions” inaugurated CityLab’s lecture series. Distinguished guests included Professor Gabriel Kassenga, Deputy Vice Chancellor of Academic Affairs Ardhi University; Dr. Isa Gada, High Commissioner of Nigerian Embassy in Tanzania; Daniella Xaver Cesar, Brazilian Embassy’s Deputy Head of Mission; and Masha Boston, Event and Outreach Coordinator from the United States Public Affairs Office at the United States Embassy of Tanzania.

Elleh framed his lecture by examining the socio-political histories behind post-independence capital-building (and fundamentally nation-building) architecture and urban planning projects. Initially examining the design of Abuja, Nigeria, in relation to other post-independence capital projects like Le Corbusier’s plan for Chandigarh, Project Planning Associates’ plan for Dodoma, L’Enfant’s plan for Washington DC, and Lucio Costa and Oscar Niemeyer’s plan for Brasília, Elleh’s lecture nimbly navigated across space and time, drawing comparisons and conclusions based not only on the spatial qualities of the projects themselves, but also on the political economy of each of these projects.

Discussing seemingly unrelated historical events like the Iranian Revolution and the 1973 Arab-Israeli War, Elleh deftly connected these historical events to the construction of the new capital of Abuja, a place strategically located in the geographical center of the country of Nigeria that would supposedly enable equitable access to the nation’s capital for all Nigerians. The chaos resulting from congested ports importing the vast amounts of cement required to build the capital city highlighted both the instrumentality of globalization in the construction of these postcolonial cities (a term generously used to describe all of the aforementioned cities) and the impact these monumental cities had, often at the expense of the daily life of these nations’ citizens. Whether it be the port congestion imposing a curfew on citizens of Lagos using the paved roads in the city, or the forced destruction of over 300 villages in the areas surrounding Abuja, these projects, despite their utopian intentions, never remain neutral.

While Elleh emphasized the often unequal systems of exchange and distribution that enable these postcolonial capital projects, he also stressed the importance of continuing to seek out revolutionary possibilities, using architectural projects, both in their idealized forms and in their actual realizations, as evidence of current outcomes and potential futures. Seeking these possibilities beyond the current condition is often a difficult task, given the wide-ranging criticisms of these modernist nation-building projects. Even Frantz Fanon, father of postcolonial theory, criticized Brasília (an important case study in Elleh’s lecture) in The Wretched of the Earth (1963), writing:

The capital must be deconsecrated; the outcast masses must be shown that we have decided to work for them. It is with this idea in mind that the government of Brazil tried to found Brasília. The dead city of Rio de Janeiro was an insult to the Brazilian people. But, unfortunately, Brasília is just another new capital, as monstrous as the first. The only advantage of this achievement is that, today, there exists a road through the bush to it (186–7).

The criticisms of many postcolonial modernist cities like Brasília and Abuja include the notion that the cities themselves do not work as intended, creating a scarcity of housing and therefore encouraging the development of informal or squatters’ settlements. While Elleh’s lecture sympathized with this notion, he also places blame on those in power, like the Nigerian president who failed to follow the urban plan for Abuja and located his palace outside the central core of the plan itself, inhibiting the aims of a planned city aimed at fostering and preserving democracy. Flipping the paradigm of assuming who in power operates informally, Elleh polemically called the president military president, Ibrahim Babangida who deviated from the urban plan by moving to the palace, “Nigeria’s biggest squatter.”

With those in power refusing to completely follow plans for these utopian cities, therefore, the utopian city remains relegated to utopia’s Greek etymological implication: non (ou) place (topos). The utopian city, as planned, remains unrealized and unrealizable. Elleh therefore claims that “failed” modernist cities are not, therefore, failed cities. They are in fact hints at, to reappropriate anthropologist AbdouMaliq Simone’s term, “the city yet to come,” a perfect city not yet fully realized.

Despite the fact that these cities are not yet fully realized, Elleh also emphasized the importance of “being your neighbor’s keeper.” When excitedly researching the Basilica of Our Lady of Peace Yamoussoukro, Côte d’Ivoire, Elleh realized that he had accidentally taken a photo of a homeless man sleeping in the vicinity of the Basilica, not noticing him until he started to slowly move. Enraptured by the spectacle of the building, Elleh recounted how, when performing research, it is easy to forget about the people who inhabit these planned spaces, whose bodies are too often removed from the drawing, model, or photograph.

As drawings, models, and photographs freeze a past moment or future possibility in time and space, they abstract the actual realities of those who inhabit those spaces. Perhaps urban theorist Michel de Certeau, in The Practice of Everyday Life (1984) sums up the core of Elleh’s lecture most eloquently:

It is true that the operations of walking can be traced on city maps in such a way as to transcribe their paths (here trodden, there very faint) and their trajectories (going this way and not that). But these thick or thin curves only refer, like words, to the absence of what has passed by. Surveys of routes miss what was: the act itself of passing by” (97).

A constant struggle exists to resolve the tension between the ideal representations of architecture and urban planning with the actual realities of how the spaces being represented are claimed and appropriated. The lecture enabled attendees—both present and future practitioners who shape the built environment—to contemplate this important tension, with a comprehensive index of grounded architecture and urban planning projects from which this tension could be considered. Ardhi University, coupled with CityLab’s unique institutional position, enabled a lively discussion that brought together a variety of individuals who typically do not have opportunities to dialogue and engage. Elleh’s lecture foreshadows the expected success of future iterations of the CityLab Lecture Series.