Description
Book SynopsisThis sweeping history of urban change in Lagos, Nigeria, reveals how its landscapes of waterways and houses have together shaped the modern city.
Waterhouses is about the places the people of Lagos have inhabited, imagined, and made home for the past two centuries. It asks what a house in Lagos is and explores how the answer to that question has been historically constructed and reconstructed in turn with the city's changing landscapes. Written for historians of African and Atlantic history, scholars and practitioners of urbanism, and anyone looking to make sense of Africa's most populous metropolis today, the book is an approachable history of how houses and water have formed modern Lagos.
The book argues that in the coastlands from which Lagos rose, housing architectures were the single most important social, material, and political instruments for people hoping to contour the city's landscapesboth its ecology and its imageand its historical course. The for
