One cannot completely avoid this landmark character with large buildings such as these. But the city itself is also gigantic.

The good is not a category that interests me.

Lagos was not very inviting even to Lagosians. It was considered a no-go zone, almost in its entirety.

The City is an addictive machine from which there is no escape

Talk about beauty and you get boring answers, but talk about ugliness and things get interesting.

Without a tighter union, Europe will disintegrate

The real thing we tried to look at is what happens to a society when the state is absent. At that point, the state had really withdrawn from Lagos; the city was left to its own devices, both in terms of money and services. That, by definition, created an unbelievable proliferation of independent agency: each citizen needed to take, in any day, maybe 400 or 500 independent decisions on how to survive that extremely complex system.