Chris Gray Memorial Lecture - Imagine Lagos: Mapping New Perspectives on a Nineteenth-Century African City

Urban questions have taken on a new urgency, as cities like Lagos grow faster and more intensely, seemingly every day. But how should we understand the ways the past shaped and produced this present? And how can, or should we, write and map the histories of people rooted in oral cultures? This presentation explores the premise that reading Lagos’s streets shapes the ways to ask, analyze and frame nineteenth-century narratives of the city. By drawing new maps of Lagos and the lagoon, I transcribe the answers to these questions as they were understood and framed in the city’s social geography.