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Waterhouses 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, Waterhouses 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.

In the decades after World War II, the United States became the most prosperous nation in the world and a superpower whose dominance was symbolized by the American suburbs. Spurred by the decline of its industrial cities and by mass suburbanization, people imagined a new national identity—one that emphasized consumerism, social mobility, and a suburban lifestyle. The urbanity of the city was lost. In When America Became Suburban, Robert A. Beauregard examines this historic intersection of urban decline, mass suburbanization, domestic prosperity, and U.S. global aspirations as it unfolded from 1945 to the mid-1970s. Suburban expansion and the subsequent emergence of sprawling Sunbelt cities transformed every aspect of American society. Assessing the global implications of America’s suburban way of life as evidence of the superiority of capitalist democracy, Beauregard traces how the suburban ideology enabled America to distinguish itself from both the Communist bloc and Western Europe, thereby deepening its claim of exceptionalism on the world-historical stage.Placing the decline of America’s industrial cities and the rise of vast suburban housing and retail spaces into a cultural, political, and global context, Beauregard illuminates how these phenomena contributed to a changing notion of America’s identity at home and abroad. When America Became Suburban brings to light the profound implications of de-urbanization: from the siphoning of investments from the cities and the effect on the quality of life for those left behind to a profound shift in national identity.Robert A. Beauregard is a professor in the Graduate School of Architecture, Planning, and Preservation at Columbia University. He is the author of Voices of Decline: The Postwar Fate of U.S. Cities and editor of Economic Restructuring and Political Response and Atop the Urban Hierarchy.