My Beauty Best Teacher

In Bombastic Elements:

Urban geographers have already started talking about the need to stop looking at slums as evidence of the failure of government policies or modernization in Africa, but to begin "theorizing African urbanism from the perspective that the innately complex and diverse "lifeworlds" of these slums already contain efficiencies and problem-solving designs, that due to nature of slums, remain unplugged from the urban grid.
Ajelogo: After the Bulldozers from Stretch Ledford on Vimeo.

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A native of Lagos, Nigeria, Nkiru Mokwe returned to her home city to study a form of urbanism in which the marketplace and transit system are codependent...she said. “And it has opened my mind to new kinds of interactions between people and the material environments they inhabit.” In her thesis project she contends:

Lagos is a modern third world megacity in a rapidly urbanizing world. Seventy per cent of its economy is grounded on unregulated markets. In anticipation of the future densification of the megalopolis, its transportation infrastructure will be atomized to facilitate an unprecedented magnitude of collective inhabitation

via IP

Dwell speaks with Erika Gee about the upcoming "Sightlines" lecture series. One of the questions was:

courtesy of Dwell

"The talks range in location from South Africa to quite literally Timbuktu. Tell me about that Timbuktu lecture and what it hopes to say about architectural cross-pollination across the continent.
That lecture looks at West African architecture and how often times academics are quick to treat it as something apart from the rest of Africa and particularly North Africa. But curator Labelle Prussin looks at the Jewish influence in Timbuktu and tries to make connections between West Africa and North Africa. She sees an influence in architecture, art, and commerce, and makes the point that West Africa is really an area with a number of different styles.

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