Educational Media Reviews Online

Rem Koolhaas has done it again. Lagos/Koolhaas allows the viewer to accompany Koolhaas while he and his students do research in Lagos, Nigeria, with the Harvard Project on the City. Rem Koolhaas is a former winner of the Pritzker Architecture Prize (which is considered by many to be the architecture equivalent of a Nobel prize) and professor of Architecture and Urban Design at Harvard University.

Lagos now has a population which is expected to reach 24 million by 2020. The city may be well on its way to becoming the largest city on earth. Koolhaas points out in the film that instead of considering Lagos doomed because of its problems with electricity, traffic, water, housing, and numerous other situations, that there is a positive side to what he calls the "culture of congestion." He also points out that the ideas of Western planning may not apply to a population that is growing in an uncontrolled fashion, and that the people of Lagos may develop a different kind of society through their development of a new kind of city. Koolhaas even goes so far as to suggest that the experience in Lagos may teach Western city planners something about how to conceive cities this large.

The film has excellent production values, and is easy to view and understand. It has been chosen as an official selection of the 2003 African Studies Association conference Film Festival, and the 2003 Marseille International Documentary Film Festival.

Highly recommended.