SustainLane Government reviews another title in books/movies. Number 2 in a series... enjoy the three-day weekend! By Research Manager Richard Young. -Editor
Lagos Wide and Close: An interactive journey into an exploding city (DVD)
Rem Koolhaas, internationally renowned architect and urban designer, teams with documentary filmmaker Bregtje van der Haak to produce a multilayered video foray into the city of Lagos.
It's often said these days that most of the world's people are urbanites, but Lagos makes that statement seem trite. This coastal city in Nigeria is expected to top 24 million denizens by 2015, making it among the largest three cities in the world.
The megalopolis began to attract Rem Koolhaas in the early 1990s, and he returned repeatedly to this understudied city throughout the decade. His fascination with Lagos results in what he calls a "forced encounter" with a radically modern city, where the seemingly informal and random improvisations of people trying to survive are, upon closer reflection, made possible only because the city was planned as a generic modern city. It is solid planning that makes Lagos work.
"It's an extreme form of modernization," reports Koolhaas, "not some kind of 'African' city." And he suggests that people make brilliant use of cities even as systems go into "reverse," but there is still dependency on the original model.
Such provocative observations make this video worthwhile for anyone involved with the future of cities. What makes the video a keeper, moreover, is its "interactive" nature: the DVD allows you to mix and match between three audio tracks with two alternate video tracks.
One audio track is Koolhaas talking; another is first-hand accounts of life in Lagos; and the third is city sounds only. The video is presented as either wide, which has aerial shots of Lagos and its "go-slow" systems seen from masterly heights, or close, which puts the viewer on the ground right up against the dense foreground.
The possible combinations make for a unique psychogeographic experience. The DVD allows you the breathing room for analytic discussion in one viewing but, next time, the hypnotizing crush of visual details might silence all highbrow thoughts. Sometimes, Koolhaas is your guide. Sometimes you're alone with only ambient machine noise. Before you know it, however, the experience is over, and you're back in your own city.
So is rural or urban life more sustainable? The question itself is probably misleading. Just as it is apparent that cities will have major difficulties in the coming years, it is also obvious that striking out for the wilderness on one’s own alone is naïve; very few people are actually able to be completely self-sufficient, even if they are able to tolerate living that way.
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