        ‘The’ role of ‘the’ city (inasmuch as this is a coherent concept) in contemporary Africa is something which is a bit difficult to pin down. Cities and city life in Africa act in many different roles. Cities are sites of cultural mixing, cultural innovation, trade, and economic innovation, among others. Somewhat paradoxically, the cities we studied behave both very similarly and very differently to cities in the United States and Europe. They are similar in that cultural and economic innovation in a number of different arenas, and they are centers of trade. But the ways in which that is carried out and the material conditions within which it is carried out are very different.
An excellent illustration of how innovation happens under different material conditions is the city of Lagos. Economic innovation is a way of life in Lagos. More accurately, economic innovation is the way of life in Lagos. In Lagos, to stagnate is to die. People are constantly looking for ways to make money to afford basic necessities of life. Not only that, but people are constantly finding new ways to use every scrap of available land and resources, because there are so many people packed into the city and so little money that no space and no resource can be wasted, and absolutely no opportunity to make profit will remain untapped for long. This leads to creative solutions such as putting a car park in the spaces between a cloverleaf interchange, and things that people in wealthier places usually wouldn’t bother with, like scavenging for scrap metal and plastic throughout the city to sell. High population density and poor infrastructure also cause problems such as traffic congestion, which swiftly get turned into economic opportunities by people like streetside water vendors, who sell plastic bags of cold water to motorists in ‘go-slow’ areas.
The city of Lagos, though it is like American cities in being a site of much trade and of economic innovation, looks and behaves differently in terms of its infrastructure, the type of trade being carried out, and the way trade is carried out. Infrastructure in Lagos is insufficient and sometimes incomplete, especially the roads. In addition to simply using streets to sell goods to passing motorists, people modify the streets and use them in unintended ways, such as constructing a dirt driving path connected to paved roads to create detours, or the appropriation of the dysfunctional Oshodi interchange to become Oshodi market. This is quite foreign to the concept of an American city, where one would face significant trouble for trying to make a new road leading off the side of a highway without consulting the city planners first, or trying to set up a business in the voids of a cloverleaf exchange. Furthermore, in American cities the road system tends to be adequate and complete, meaning that places like Oshodi market never get to exist because the roads are being used as roads rather than being a useless mess that someone can find a creative use for.
