{"product_id":"waterhouses-mark-duerksen-9780896803312","title":"Waterhouses: Landscapes, Housing, and the Making of Modern Lagos","description":"\u003ci\u003eWaterhouses\u003c\/i\u003e is about the places the people of Lagos have inhabited, imagined, and made home for the past two centuries. It asks what a house in Lagos is and explores how the answer to that question has been historically constructed and reconstructed in turn with the city's changing landscapes. Written for historians of African and Atlantic history, scholars and practitioners of urbanism, and anyone looking to make sense of Africa's most populous metropolis today, the book is an approachable history of how houses and water have formed modern Lagos. The book argues that in the coastlands from which Lagos rose, housing architectures were the single most important social, material, and political instruments for people hoping to contour the city's landscapes--both its ecology and its image--and its historical course. The forms and meanings of houses in Lagos have shifted dramatically over time and in ways that reveal how power, house making, visual perception, and the environment are entangled in modern cities. The book's chapters encompass six eras and six waterscapes: sandbars, canals, swamps, lagoons, oceans, and floods. These spaces guide the book's exploration of how people saw and attempted to remake Lagos's environs in a process that invariably involved housing architectures. At its core, Lagos is a city built through the materials, relations, and powers contained in the dry, solid, and hospitable spaces of homes, which have long been scarce and culturally celebrated resources in the city's water-constricted setting. While shelter is integral to any city's development, houses have been particularly important and sought after in Lagos because of the city's land shortages and because of the societal influence and physical footprint of traditional Yoruba ilé (family compounds), in which activities were historically organized and centered. Through dozens of maps, photographs, and housing plans found in British and Nigerian archives, this book traces the relationship between Lagos's residential spaces and its urban landscapes across the rise, fall, and aftermath of British colonization. By showing how Yoruba visions of home--though often forgotten or misunderstood today--coexisted with European notions, \u003ci\u003eWaterhouses\u003c\/i\u003e offers urban planners, policy makers, and architects ideas for how the definingly human act of inhabiting a place might be grounded in practices of continuous custodianship rather than extractive possession.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eAuthor:\u003c\/b\u003e Mark Duerksen\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eISBN-10:\u003c\/b\u003e 0896803317\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eISBN-13:\u003c\/b\u003e 9780896803312\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003ePublisher:\u003c\/b\u003e Ohio University Press\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eLanguage:\u003c\/b\u003e English\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003ePublished:\u003c\/b\u003e 08\/27\/2024\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003ePages:\u003c\/b\u003e 304\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eFormat:\u003c\/b\u003e Hardcover","brand":"Mark Duerksen","offers":[{"title":"Hardcover","offer_id":48742347407615,"sku":"9780896803312","price":80.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":false}],"url":"https:\/\/www.whiterainbookhouse.com\/products\/waterhouses-mark-duerksen-9780896803312","provider":"WR Book House","version":"1.0","type":"link"}