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The Circle Mall Situation
How class inequality impacts Urban Design
In 2008, while commuting back home from work in one of the Lagos danfo buses, I observed the stark differences in the demographics of the people on the right side of the bus — who came from the cluster of low income neighbourhoods opposite Victoria Garden City (VGC), Ajah Lagos; and those of the people on the left side of bus that lived in VGC. This inspired me to write a short short story titled Zone B, a pun on the word Zombie. This story captured the conflicts I observed as the Lekki-Ajah road became symbolic in this harsh portraiture of class division.
10 years later, the road had been expanded by the Lagos State government and developers had built a spanking new shopping mall called Circle Mall and clusters of high end residential estates on the rich side of Zone B. Sadly, across the road from the Circle Mall, Jakande estate remained a weather-beaten encampment of rows and rows of unpainted, grimy apartments staring back at the gleaming new mall and its adjoining affluent neighbourhoods; until one day that a fire, kindled far away in South Africa blew across Africa and ignited the ticking bomb that had been threatening to explode on that road since I had first observed it in 2008.
That year, there had been xenophobic attacks in the South Africa against Nigerians. The news…
