Name: 【TED】OluTimehin Adegbeye: Who belongs in a city? (Who belongs in a city? | OluTimehin Adegbeye)
Uploaded: 2017-09-22T15:49:51.000Z
Duration: 12 min 4 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

Cities are like siblings in a large polygamous family.

Basic passive voice

Each one has a unique personality and is headed in a distinct direction.

Adverbs of degree

But they all have somewhat shared origins.

Sometimes I think postcolonial cities are like the children

"Ah, why can't you be more like your sister?"

The "why" of cities is largely the same, no matter where they are:

an advantageous location that makes trade and administration possible;

a popular willingness to be in constant flux

The "how" of cities, however, is a whole other story.

How do they decide who belongs and who doesn't?

by following the noise and the dancing, right?

Like any major city, that place is a lot of things,

Our public transportation doesn't quite work,

so we have these privately owned bright yellow buses

Luxury car showrooms line badly maintained and often flooded roads.

Street evangelism is only slightly less ubiquitous

Sex workers sometimes have two degrees, a bank job

there can be either a party or a burned body

There is so much that is possible in Lagos

and very often the difference between possibility and impossibility

and if you're lucky enough, who you're connected to.

determined by ethnic origin, sexual orientation, gender,

but most visibly and often most violently,

fisherpeople from the inland creeks started to come down the Lagos lagoon

About 60 years later, my grandfather, Oludotun Adekunle Kukoyi,

Like me, he was an alumnus of the University of Ibadan,

a young member of the educated elite in the independence era.

Over time, he built an illustrious career as a land surveyor,

when they were just waist-high wild grass.

And by that time, my family, like the families of those fisherpeople,

which can be translated to mean that Lagos will welcome anyone.

But that saying is becoming less and less true.

Many Lagosians, including the descendants of those fisherpeople

who arrived generations before my grandfather,

that has been described as "the new Dubai."

You see, Lagos inspires big dreams, even in its leaders,

and successive governments have declared aspirations

towards a megacity where poverty does not exist.

Unfortunately, instead of focusing on the eradication of poverty

the strategy of choice focuses on eliminating the poor.

Last October, the Governor announced plans

to demolish every single waterfront settlement in Lagos.

There are more than 40 of these indigenous communities

with a population about three-quarters that of Monaco

and similar potential for beachfront luxury --

I first heard of Otodo Gbame after the demolition started.

When I visited in November 2016, I met Magdalene Aiyefoju.

whose surname means, "the world is blind."

Magdalene's son Basil was one of over 20 people

Standing outside her shelter, I saw the two white-sand football fields

Spread all around us were the ruins of schools, churches,

Young children enthusiastically helped to put up shelters,

and about 5,000 of the residents, with nowhere else to go,

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【TED】OluTimehin Adegbeye: Who belongs in a city? (Who belongs in a city? | OluTimehin Adegbeye)

potential

resilience

eliminate

matter