Infrastructural gaps exist within African cities because existing infrastructures are not maintained or upgraded. MacGregor Canal is a pre-colonial infrastructural waterway built during the turn of the last century; it is 2.1km in length and separates Lagos Island East from West and is a necessary artery of public drainage, helping to regulate the water-level within the Lagos Lagoon. Today it is severely clogged and polluted with waste and sewage effluent; it no longer performs its function within the city and is in need of recommissioning and revitalization. Our proposal is to transform the meaning of the canal within the city by layering its infrastructural purpose with other, valuable amenities such as public, civic and commercial space. By hybridizing the technical with the civic we believe that infrastructure can have new resonance within urban spaces.
Considering the size of the site the project has been divided into 5 phases, allowing for momentum and community support to be gathered. These are essential to the mission of the project and the vision of a city which embraces and celebrates its necessary infrastructures. The 1st phase is approx 335m. Cities around the world have begun to see their public infrastructural heritage as an opportunity to create a new breed of civic and public spaces, revitalizing communities and providing much needed facilities and opportunities for greening, recreation, performance and entrepreneurship. Embedded forms of ‘micro-infrastructure’ operate on a small and local scale and therefore have significant potential to engage with local communities and produce alternative definitions of civic space and the shared public realm of under-served areas of the city. New hybrids and untried modalities for public life are yet to be tested and designed in conditions such as these where such extreme density is coupled with physical and infrastructural fragmentation.
