Chaos and Complexity: Lagos and lessons for megacity management in the

21st century
David Rubens MSc, CSyP, FSyI, is currently completing his thesis for the
University of Portsmouth Professional Doctorate in Security & Risk Management,
where his research involves developing models of strategic management and
critical decision making for complex crisis environments. He has just returned to the
UK after spending 15 months as MD of a US security consultancy in Nigeria.
Abstract: Megacities across the world have seemingly reached the limits
of what can be effectively managed within centrally controlled, directivebased mega-urban management frameworks. These challenges are most
starkly seen in the emerging megacities of the global south, where the
natural state of such megacities seems to be a permanent state of
dysfunctional chaos. However, an alternative perspective sees the
apparent chaos as an extremely sophisticated self-regulating system of
micro-environments that offer a glimpse into alternative megacity
management models.
Keywords: Megacity, complexity, wicked problems, crisis management
The status of the city as the highest form of human social organisation has been an
idea and ideal that has maintained pre-eminence since at least the time of the
Greeks. Cities are not only drivers of economic growth and development, they
create a framework that drives progress in all aspects of cultural, intellectual and
social activity.
It is perhaps both a symptom and a cause of a modern global malaise that not only
is the role and function of cities being questioned but also the viability of their very
continued existence. Like anything in nature that aspires to gargantuatism, cities
have moved beyond the bounds whereby the structures and frameworks that first
allowed them to prosper and thrive can continue to support the monsters that they
have become. With the rate of growth predicted to rise on Malthusian scales (the
global urban population is estimated to grow by 70 million people a year), the ability

of city managers to continue to supply basic life-management structures is going to

be increasingly challenged beyond breaking point.
Cities are not only beginning to fail in their fundamental purposes as anyone will
know who has sat in a traffic jam on a road system designed for a slower and
simpler age they are actually killing the people who live there. Whether it is
pollution or the ever-present stress of over-crowded urban life, the question is how
the next stage of city development will play out.
Mega-City Management: Dysfunctional or merely self-organizing?
The rise of the megacity has been accompanied by a paradox that sets the utopian
city of the future against the reality for hundreds of millions of people of the daily
struggle that is associated with life in the megacities of the emerging world. In
many ways, the urban dweller in modern day Lagos, Mumbai, Dhaka or So
Paulowould actually see more connections with the 19 th-century urban poor
described in Dickens in terms of negotiating the multitude of interactions that go to
make up daily survival than with the modern-day planners in London, Tokyo and
New York considering how fibre-optic communications systems can best be utilised
to integrate global financial management, web-based home security systems or
internet ordering from the local sushi bar.
Although the rise of the emerging worlds megacities has been well-documented, it
is only relatively recently that the third world experience, and particularly that
based on the mega-slums and favelas of the emerging south, has been seen as
anything other than exceptional. Under this reading, the accepted model of a
major city has implied the integrated management and planned development
associated with Europe and North America (and to a lesser degree Asia). The vast
unmanaged slums of the third world were therefore considered outliers with no
particular significance from an urban theory perspective. In fact, so deeply
entrenched is the the conceptualisation of the global south megacity that [t]he
slum has become the most common itinerary through which the Third World city
(i.e. the megacity) is recognized .1
However, many of todays dysfunctional mega-cities had previous lives as well-run
and even model urban centres, mixing Western-style planned development with a
local flavour. But sudden, unmanageable growth rates soon outstripped the
capabilities of the governance frameworks. Until the mid-1970s, for example, Lagos
was a functioning mid-range city, with a relatively simple management system and
few complex challenges. Increased urbanisation then led to an expanded demand
on its services and infrastructure, triggering a self-perpetuating cycle of failure and
institutionalised disenfranchisement. Whilst the growth of the developed-world
1 Roy, Ananya (2011) Slumdog Cities: Rethinking Subaltern Urbanism. International
Journal of Urban and Regional Research, Volume 35(2):223-238, p. 225.

megacities was wealth- and opportunity-driven, in the developing-world megacities,

those that were attracted to the urban centres were often unskilled and without the
support networks that would allow them to achieve even the lowest level of selfsustaining lifestyles. This inevitably led to the emergence of shanties and slums
which, together with a culture of endemic urban planning violations, rapidly created
a monster that grew beyond the powers of its handlers to control.
The descent of Lagos from a fully-functioning (and even thriving) urban African
centre to a dysfunctional megacity is an issue of political (non-)governance rather
than purely one of urban growth. Whilst it might be difficult to differentiate between
the causes and the effects of the descent into failing city status in what is
undoubtedly a complex series of closed feedback loops, to represent the city as it is
today as an inherently African condition is to ignore the dysfunctional political and
social systems that have arrested the growth of the infrastructure of the city and
left it in dire need of help.2
If Lagos were a child she would definitely be described, even by the parents that
love her, as having challenging behavioural traits. As the Honourable
Commissioner, Lagos State Ministry of Physical Planning and Urban Development
wrote in the foreword to a 2012 report, By the turn of the last century, Lagos had
become an international poster child for the doomsayers of the coming urban
challengewith a reputation for overcrowded and squalid living conditions, high
rates of crime, poor governance, urban and environmental degradation and
transport chaos.3 If Tokyo can claim to be the vision of the future of the hyperconnected 21st century city, then Lagos could equally claim to be its evil twin sister,
projecting its reflection through a demented mirror of dysfunctionality and chaos.
In 1964, when Nigeria declared independence from its British colonial rulers, Lagos
had less than a million inhabitants and could claim to be a self-conscious beacon of
a successful modern African urban centre; cosmopolitan, self-confident, globally
aware and connected, but also secure in its African identity. The opening of the
National Theatre in 1976 was a significant landmark in the consciousness of Lagos,
appearing in many writings as either signifying the peak of national pride and
confidence or a symbol of the disparity between its outward show and the reality of
the lack of supporting infrastructure (the opening gala was disturbed by a powercut, a reality of life in Lagos even today). In the same year, a decision was made
that Lagos had reached an insupportable level of dysfunctionality (largely based on
the continuous grid-lock due to an explosion of the number of vehicles on the road

2 Isichei, Uche (2002). From and for Lagos, Nigeria. Archis No 1:12-15, p. 2.
3 Filani, Michael O (2012). The Changing Face of Lagos: From Vision to Reform and
Transformation. Cities Alliance, p. 4.

combined with a lack of urban planning and traffic management) and that a new
capital, Abuja, would need to be constructed from scratch.
The Lagos experiment in combining modern urbanism with an African flavour was
perhaps doomed from the outset, suffering from Incomplete modernity. 4 This
phrase encapsulates both the physical architecture of colonial period major cities,
where there was a legacy of under-developed and unequally distributed urban
facilities, as well as local power hierarchies that produced a highly iniquitous and
unstable legacy of authoritarian and undemocratic control.
Post-colonial administration was often fractured, with departments, ministries and
agencies being created on an ad hoc basis and little overview of the strategic
requirements or even basic organisational frameworks. Such initiatives created the
seeds of destruction from their inception. In Lagos, as in many mega-cities, rather
than simplifying the governance structure, each reform merely succeeded in adding
seemingly-endless layers of competing jurisdictions and agencies. Administratively,
Lagos State comprises five divisions. In 1991, the divisions were further subdivided
into 20 local government areas, and in 2006, into 37 local government council
areas. While the local government areas are duly recognised in the Nigerian
Constitution, the local council areas are not. Different jurisdictional systems are
used for different purposes-- for example, tax collection, development projects and
the management and implementation of local government programmes.
In reality, the problems Lagos has been facing--and which came to full maturity in
the dark years of military dictatorship (1966-79, 1983-98)--had antecedents in the
earliest days of colonial rule. Despite the fact that British authorities saw Lagos as
the Liverpool of West Africa, there was a disinclination to invest the resources to
develop it as a functioning, modern city and it was known for its swamps and lack of
infrastructure, especially its lack of sewage system. Although there have
undoubtedly been improvements made in recent years, in large part due to the
return of democracy and the emergence of an increasingly meritocratic, technicallyenabled administrative class, one description of Lagos shows what happens when
the struggle becomes too tough, and city managers just give up:
With no strategic urban planning, the city has had to contend with challenges such
as uncontrolled urban sprawl, inadequate and overburdened infrastructure, housing
shortages, social and economic exclusion, high youth unemployment, inadequate
funding of urban development, rising crime and physical insecurity, cumbersome
judicial processes, and low-level preparedness for disaster management. In
addition, a large informal sector has developed, primarily as a result of in-migration
of unskilled labour .5

4 Gandy, M. (2006). Planning, anti-planning and the infrastructure crisis facing

metropolitan Lagos. Urban Studies, 43(2):37196, p. 374.

The inexorable growth of slum neighbourhoods created the perception that such
traditional communities were outside the framework of structured city
management, which in turn led to increasing levels of alienation, degradation and
public health issues. Such problems were then delineated in terms of public order
and safety rather than support and resourcing. At the same time, the responsibility
for those areas was seen as being with the residents rather than those with the
power to do so something about it. Even if there had been a vision of modern
African urban planning, the combination of structural vulnerabilities, a lack of
political / administrative frameworks and a lack of a suitably empowered
administrative class conspired to derail the African modernisation process from the
start.
The modern megacity is widely viewed as in a failing state. However, an alternative
view based on his study of Lagos is espoused by R. Koolhaas , who sees Lagos as a
self-managing organism within which constant negotiations between microcommunities take place outside of any formal city management framework. For
Koolhaas, these daily personal negotiations are not a sign of failed management,
but rather a developed, extreme paradigmatic case-study of a city at the forefront
of globalizing modernity .6 In this view, the cutting-edge modernity of developing
world megacities should be recognised, rather than being judgmentally labelled as
primitive when measured against the template of developed Western cities . 7
Although it is clearly easier to build functionality and good governance into a major
city than retro-fit it once it has descended into a failed state, if the megacities of the
developing world are to find a way of stabilising themselves, then Lagos may well
be the petri-dish where such experiments can be carried out. As the Filani report
makes clear, any improvements will be the result of the transformation of the
systems of governance built on sustained political leadership and long-term policies
rather than quick fix solutions. Some of the planks of the transformation that Filani
identifies are: the development of a knowledge-based approach to policy
development; the development of partnerships between public and private sectors
that allow effective policy implementation frameworks; increased oversight and
management of public spending; more effective tax and revenue collection
5 Filani, p. 16.
6 Koolhaas, R., P. Belanger, C.J. Chung, J. Comaroff, M. Cosmas, S. Gandhi, D.A.
Hamilton, L.Y. Ip, J.Kim, G. Shepard, R. Singh, N. Slayton, J. Stone and S. Wahba
(2000). Lagos, Harvard Project on the City. In R. Koolhaas, S. Kwinter, S. Boeri, N.
Tazi and H.U. Obrist (eds.), Mutations, vnement culturel sur la ville
contemporaine, Arc en Rve, Centre darchitecture, Bordeaux, p. 653.
7 Robinson, J. (2013). Ordinary cities: between modernity and development.
Routledge.

(revenues in Lagos rose from 600m Naira/month ($3.8m) in 1999 to more than 7.bn
Naira ($45m) in 2007); the use of information and communication technology and
data collection; and specific programmatic interventions in alliance with UN,
regional and national agencies. At the same time, there is the development of
parastatal agencies that created the framework for policy implementation, including
Lagos State Emergency Management Authority (LASEMA), Lagos State Emergency
Medical Services (LASEMS), Lagos State Waste Management Authority (LAWMA) and
the Lagos Metropolitan Area Transport Authority (LAMATA) amongst others . 8
Lagos and its brethren megacities across the developing global south are not
second-rate, primitive recreations of real cities, but models of a future postmodern urban reality. The problems that these megacities have been wrestling with
for decades are increasingly taking centre stage in even the most advanced cities of
the Western world. The issue is no longer how to manage better but rather how to
create a more appropriate management system. An adherence to a mechanistic,
directive-based polity no longer reflects the hyper-complexity of the modern urban
experience. Given the chaotic and free-forming nature of much of megacity life,
there is a clear parallel between some of the issues being faced in developing an
effective crisis management decision-making framework and the same issues being
confronted in megacity management circles. If the megacities of the present are to
maintain relevance for the future, Lagos may well be the pathfinder for the journey
ahead. If, as the saying goes, within chaos there is opportunity, Lagos undoubtedly
has no shortage of the former. It is my hope and belief that it is also provides the
setting for the latter. As Koolhaas put it, from this perspective, Lagos is not catching
up with us. Rather, we may be catching up with Lagos. 9

8 Filani, p. 6.
9 Koolhaas et al, quoted in Roy, p. 227.

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