Makoko, the floating slum on Lake Lagos in Nigeria, is gearing up to welcome a three-story floating school. The project is being developed by Nigeria-born Netherland-based architect, Kunle Adiyemi and the Heinrich Boell Stiftung; a German green project foundation.
The "Makoko Floating School" project will be a floating community school built of 16 floating platforms lashed together. The school will be capable of holding around 100 students ranging from ages 4 to 12, reports Curbed.
The $6250 project, developed by NLE, Adiyemi's architecture firm, is currently under construction. The platforms will be built using locally sourced wood and around 256 empty plastic drums for buoyancy. Wooden beams will be used to build two upper floors containing classrooms and the base will have a wide area, which will be used as a playground for the children. The floating school will also have bathroom facilities. Solar panels will provide electricity in the school.
While the children of Makoko are more excited than ever, the project is seen as a "very stable", nature preserving and sustainable venture.
"There are urban strategies for dealing with sea level rises and flooding that are more infrastructure-related. But this is about flood-prone areas within cities that we can use for urbanization," Adiyemi said to Co-Exist.
"Particularly in view of climate change, there's a need to adapt buildings. We decided to use this as a prototype for developing something whether the water level rises or goes down, the building responds to that," he said in a statement.
Check out the renderings of the Makoko floating school project here.
Makoko is a fishing village located on Lake Lagos. The people of Makoko live on homes built on stilts on the lake itself. It was established in the eighteenth century and has been declared an illegal settlement by the government of Nigeria. It has limited government presence and security is provided by local area boys.
In 2012, the government issued a 72 hours notice to the residents of the slum to vacate the place as they had no residential deeds. The stilts of some of the houses were slashed and a man even died in a clash with the police. Things have been bad since then. The government is still bent on ridding the city of the slum but Adiyemi claims that the settlement could be converted into a beautiful civilized water-top settlement.
When asked about the slum displacement issue, Adiyemi said:
"If the people don't live here, they'll live somewhere else, what we're only trying to do is offer them a better solution.