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Quote by Rem Koolhaas

“The real thing we tried to look at is what happens to a society when the state is absent. At that point, the state had really withdrawn from Lagos; the city was left to its own devices, both in terms of money and services. That, by definition, created an unbelievable proliferation of independent agency: each citizen needed to take, in any day, maybe 400 or 500 independent decisions on how to survive that extremely complex system.”

Quote by Rem Koolhaas

Author

Rem Koolhaas is a renowned Dutch architect, born on November 17, 1944. Known for his unique architectural style and theoretical contributions, his work has a widespread influence globally. more

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“Lagos was the ultimate dysfunctional city - but actually, in terms of all the initiatives and ingenuity, it mobilised an incredibly beautiful, almost utopian landscape of independence and agency.”

Beautiful Term Cities Ultimate Independence Landscape Agency Initiative Ingenuity Utopian

Author:Rem Koolhaas

“We discovered a person in Lagos who had a fish stall, and within a single square metre she carried two children all the way to Harvard. She supported an unbelievable escape of her children into education. In that sense it was a city completed pixillated, and every pixel contained amazing stories.”

Way Children Persons Two Stories Cities Fishes Squares Unbelievable Harvard Pixels

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“The institutions are working better now, the banks are much more functional. At this time, 1997, there were no mobile phones! It's a whole different thing now with mobile phones: technology has created a form of regulation, because people can actually talk to each other a lot more.”

People Different Whole Form Technology Institutions Phones Different Things Regulation Mobile Mobile Phones Better Now

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“That has been another interesting discovery: that basically a city [Lagos] could recover from a really deep, deep, deep pit.”

Has Beens Interesting Cities Discovery Pits Really Deep

Author:Rem Koolhaas

“At that time [90th in Lagos], if you drove through the city, you drove through a foreground that always seemed to be incredibly dramatic and incredibly agonised - smoking, burning, incredible compression. In the first year we stayed on the ground and went everywhere. But then in order to discover whether this was the whole story, we rented a helicopter. And we began to understand that this is not chaos but a highly modern system that had been abandoned, then at some point went into reversal, then slowly came out of it.”

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Author:Rem Koolhaas

“You need to look at inequality as a typical condition of modern society.”

Needs Looks Modern Conditions Inequality Typical Modern Society

Author:Rem Koolhaas

“There's something really interesting about current urbanism: the only model is the universal model, and there is increasingly incapacity to consider the virtues and the qualities that are there, and then to build on them. The only thing is complete transformation.”

Interesting Quality Virtue Models Universal Transformation Currents Really Interesting Incapacity

Author:Rem Koolhaas

“In Lagos there's a really strong case to resurrect strong parts. Embedded in all of it are some amazing pieces of planning, amazing pieces of engineering and interaction. For instance, the campus of Lagos University is stunningly beautiful, efficient and generous, and that needs to be recognised and preserved.”

Needs Beautiful Strong Cases Pieces University Planning Instance Generous Efficient Interaction Engineering Campus Embedded

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“Why I talked about political correctness: the colonial is now such a major taboo that any achievement of the colonial period, or any generosity implied in colonialism, is again fundamentally neglected or fundamentally not recognised. That's crazy, because history is a series of layers, and you cannot say, "This layer I support and this layer I cancel." History is history and you cannot retrospectively manipulate it.”

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“I studied in London in 1968. Our school had a separate department of tropical architecture. Of course it was totally unfashionable, partly because nobody wanted to think about colonialism, but basically what you learned there was that, OK, the sun is here, so you should create natural ventilation here - an unbelievable amount of really sound principles that have been completely abandoned, so now everything is air conditioned with big machines.”

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Author:Rem Koolhaas