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Quote by Rem Koolhaas

“Lagos was not very inviting even to Lagosians. It was considered a no-go zone, almost in its entirety.”

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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

“Lagos was a city that had been turned against itself. There was a bridge that became the perfect trap for crimes, which began with nails being scattered to cause flat tyres. If the driver stopped, the car would be dismantled in 20 minutes and the parts thrown overboard [to people waiting below]. The system had turned into a kind of destructive device that could be used against people. That was the narrative.”

People Ifs Kind Would Be Used Causes Waiting Perfect Cities Minutes Car Crime Narrative Bridges Destructive Thrown Flats Devices Drivers Nails Traps Overboard Tyres

Author:Rem Koolhaas

“Lagos has also had a particular effect on my career. I was there early, and although it was a courageous step to go there and invest on this scale - I went there maybe 20 times - it's also been also super-controversial. There's an old school of thought that somebody like me has no place to go there.Because of colonialism and so on.”

School Steps Careers Effects Particular Scales Like Me Courageous Colonialism Controversial Old School Places To Go

Author:Rem Koolhaas

“It was a book [George Packer written on our presence in Nigeria] that was killed by the response of other people. Which sounds quite cowardly, perhaps, but it was the first manifestation of what is currently a really big issue: how political correctness defines the limits of what you can do. In that sense, it was super-exciting and maybe the most magical project we did, but at the same time fraught with mixed feelings.”

“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 At that point, the state had really withdrawn from Lagos; the city was left to its own devices, both in terms of money and services.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.”

Looks Real States Happens Left Term Decision Cities Needed Citizens Independent Complexes Definitions Agency Devices Unbelievable Absent Real Things Proliferation Complex Systems

Author:Rem Koolhaas

“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

Author:Rem Koolhaas

“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

Author:Rem Koolhaas

“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.”

Ifs Years Firsts Whole Stories Order Cities Modern Chaos Incredibles Burning Dramatic Smoking Abandoned Helicopters Reversal Foreground Compression

Author:Rem Koolhaas

Quote by Rem Koolhaas

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