Africa’s Planned Cities Need Unplanning

Victoria Island, Nigeria—”Sorry, you can’t enter. Next time, call our sales office in advance.”

That was the greeting my three-man detail and I got after enduring the multihour traffic slog from mainland Lagos to Eko Atlantic. I had never considered that such a high-profile real estate project, launched in 2009, would still be gated to visitors. And when we peered past the guard, it did not seem like much was happening inside. Eko was a smattering of stand-alone high-rises popping up from a barren landscape.

“You’ll have to return tomorrow,” the guard said.

So we decided that day, and much of the rest of my two weeks in Lagos, to visit the city’s many illegal shantytowns instead.

They had a different setup: Anyone can enter, and people were particularly welcoming of me, a rare white visitor. The areas are full of commerce, like linear Walmarts, with anything for sale on a given block. They don’t have Eko’s media buzz—some even carry stigmas—but they’re more functional.

This comparison speaks to a paradox I’ve found with African real estate. The more “formal” a project is—with master plans, institutional investors, and government involvement—the more slowly it materializes. The more “informal” it is, with minimal rules other than how locals self-govern, the more quickly it becomes a real city.

But maybe that’s not odd.

Eko Atlantic had been on my travel bucket list for years. I’m currently on an 18-month trip through the Global South, spending six months apiece in Latin America, Africa, and Asia. One goal is to visit the rising crop of “startup cities” in each region. These are private, for-profit, master-planned projects, often built with government collaboration, that look to compete with and decentralize crowded city cores.

Eko might be the continent’s most-discussed startup city, aiming to become “the Dubai of Africa.” A partnership between the firm South Energyx Nigeria Limited and the state and federal governments, it is a massive land reclamation project. They’re using dredged-up fill to build what will be a four-square-mile city, buttressed with a sea wall to prevent flooding in Lagos.

The plan is to create a gated city and financial and lifestyle hub for international elites. It will have stable laws, a “free zone” status full of tax and regulatory benefits, a canal system with water taxis (again, think Dubai), and a somewhat hands-off land use regime, reflected by those few early skyscrapers.

Already, condos start at $700,000 and rise to seven figures. The trend should continue upward once the new $537 million U.S. consulate building, the largest of its kind in Africa, is occupied. Eko has received gushing media coverage and Clinton Global Initiative sponsorship. The long-term goal is to house 250,000, a population density mirroring Manhattan.

Yet 14 years in, Eko is a ghost town.

The Africa-based YouTuber Steven Ndukwu has some theories about why it remains empty, including weak currency and the low wages of average Nigerians relative to the high land prices in Eko. Development director Pierre Edde, who we were able to meet on our second visit, made similar excuses. Nigeria suffered, he said, through eight years of dismal economic performance under former President Muhammadu Buhari, causing sharp average income declines even before COVID-19.

But the most important reason seems self-evident: Eko built a wall isolating itself fro