post-colonial sensory infrastructure - ravi sundaram (e-flux)

More than a decade ago, Rem Koolhaas published his widely circulated essay “Fragments of a Lecture on Lagos” as part of a Documenta 11 platform in that city devoted to African urbanism. Koolhaas went on to consider the status of Lagos, which seemed to have an aura of “apocalyptic violence” and of a “smoldering rubbish dump.” A series of further enquiries revealed new informal networks entering the interstices of older, decaying infrastructures. Finally, it was a crucial helicopter ride by which Koolhaas showed that Lagos, rather than bordering permanently on chaos, functioned as a series of functional correspondences, with a dynamic “confrontation of people and infrastructure.” This clinching aerial insight followed a familiar trend in the history of architecture.

http://www.e-flux.com/journal/post-postcolonial-sensory-infrastructure/