The Biggest City in the World?

Lagos Island - from Wikipedia

The ranking of cities is an exercise notoriously fraught with all kinds of problems. Do we mean cities-proper, meaning a core political unit, or a broader metropolitan area? Do we mean the entire cachement area influenced or affected by a city? Almost any way of looking at the world's cities has put Tokyo at the top for several decades, usually followed by some combination of Shanghai, Mumbai, and Delhi. 

a common part of transit in Lagos

So I was a bit surprised when reading an airline magazine * on board my flight from Jos to Lagos when it proclaimed Lagos "the world's biggest city." Reading the fine print of the article, it was clear that the author was referring to a projection that, if current trends continue, Lagos will be the world's largest city -- with over 30 million people -- by 2050. I've since seen several variations on this theme, and the definitional and statistical questions are large. But what is without doubt is that Lagos is a HUGE city, by far the largest in sub-Saharan Africa with somewhere between 15-20 million people, with rapid continuing population growth. 

Like several other cities in coastal West Africa, Lagos spreads over a series of islands and lagoons near the shore, but has long ago spread onto the mainland in several directions. This complex islands-mainland geography has made transit difficult. In recent years, several roads have been built quite literally on the sea -- long bridges running parallel to the land -- in order to try to keep up with the city's expansion.

A market in Ikorodu

Yet unlike so many other mega-cities which have made great strides in terms of urban planning, public transportation, and air, rail, and road infrastructure, Lagos lags far behind. Traffic jams, known locally as "go slow," seem to figure in just about every decision in Lagos. When planning for transit from one meeting to another tomorrow morning, I was told "we can leave at six in the morning and be there by ten, or wait until ten and be there by twelve." This is a distance of perhaps 15 miles. I've since been told that the person who shared this was being a bit cautious, but not overly so. Southern California suddenly looks like a commuter's paradise. 

The town/city/suburb of Ikorodu is located about 25 miles from central Lagos, on the north side of the Lagos Lagoon. It clearly once had an existence completely separate from the city of Lagos, as it has a historic center all its own, with some lovely traditional homes and old churches and mosques. It also has an unforgettable marketplace. The town drapes itself over a series of low hills rising up from the Lagoon and is cut through by numerous tropical rivulets lined with banana and palm trees. It has a quieter feel than much of Lagos proper, and a bit less of the sense of a mega-city environment. There are parts of it that one could call peaceful. 

An old home in Ikorodu

Overall, I have to say that Lagos is one of the most overwhelming cities I have encountered. Yet many millions of people -- no one seems to know quite how many millions -- somehow make it work every day. 

* The fact that there IS an airline magazine in the seat pocket of the CR Regional Jet flying a domestic route in Nigeria says a lot about how far air travel within Africa has come in recent years.