拉各斯：混凝土城市

一整篇关于城市道路规划的英文原文,前三段的翻译。

LAGOS：

CITY OF CONCRETE

Giles Omezi

拉各斯：混凝土城市

加尔斯.欧梅兹

“…Elvis did not pay too much attention to the cars that in spite of their speed wove between each other like careful threads of a tapestry. The motorways were the only way getting across the series of towns that made up Lagos.Intent on reaching their destinations,pedestrians dodged between the speeding vehicles as they crossed the wide motorways.It was dangerous,and every day at least ten people were killed trying to cross the road.If they didn’t die when they first car hit them,subsequent cars finished the job.They curious thing,though was that there were hundreds of overhead pedestrian bridges and then crossed underneath them.”

“......埃尔维斯并没有过多地关注于车，尽管它们以速度在彼此之间编织像挂毯一样的的精心线程。高速公路是穿越组成拉各斯的一系列的城镇的唯一途径.在穿越宽阔的高速公路时，为了到达目的地，行人在飞速的车轮间躲闪。这是危险的事情，每天至少有十人在试图穿越马路时死亡。如果他们在第一辆车撞他们时没有死，随后汽车会撞死他们.奇怪的是，就算有数百架人行天桥，行人也会从人行天桥下穿过。“

Lagos sits on topography dominated by ubiquitous marshlands and a vast lagoon draining several rivers north of the city.It thus presents the road engineer with the dilemma of how to stitch this rapidly expanding city together to aid movement between its constituent parts over such challenging terrain.Over twenty-five years,specifically between 1967 and 1992,the combined efforts of the Federal Government and Lagos State roped the city together using a system of fast expressways,which were viewed as the solution to the traffic problem that was becoming apparent as a major issue as far back as the late 1950s.At this point,the population of the city hovered just below the million mark,today estimates put it at close to eighteen million people.

拉各斯坐落在以无处不在沼泽地和巨大的泻湖为主的地势，这个泻湖的水流向几条城北的河流。这种情况使道路工程师陷入窘境，即如何将这个迅速扩张的城市与它的各个组成部分之间的运动辅助整合到一起，并且还是在如此具有挑战性的

一整篇关于城市道路规划的英文原文,前三段的翻译。

地形条件上。超过二十五年来，特别是1967年到1992年间，联邦政府和拉各斯州的持续不断的努力拉拢城市一起使用快速的高速公路，早在20世纪50年代末这就被看作是解决交通问题越来越明显的一个主要系统问题. 在这一点上，这个城市的人口徘徊着快要跌破万元大关，而如今，估计它在接近1800万人。 The city’s expressway system consists of three north-south axial roads that connect the island of Lagos with the mainland of Lagos and sets up a language that fuses a vocabulary of multiple lanes,cloverleaf interchanges,and bridges to aid mobility of the car.The most westerly arterial road,known as the Western Avenue System begins at the western tip of Lagos Island as the Eko Bridge,rising over the swamps of Ijora and Iganmu,through the residential district of Surulere and heads off north.After a kink in its alignment,it passes through Mushin becoming the ten-lane Agege Motor Road, which leads eventually to the old town of Abeokura north of Lagos.The next arterial is the Ikorodu Road, which as a continuation of the Carter Bridge and Murtala Mohamed Way,cuts through the older districts on the mainland and beyond on its way to Ikorodu and the Ijebu towns north of the Lagos Lagoon. The last of these arterial roads is the Third Mainland Bridge, which floats over the Lagos Lagoon detached from the its western bank.Described as the longest bridge in Africa at twelve kilometers, the Third Mainland Bridge enables the affluent residents of the districts of Ikoyi and Victoria Island to bypass much of Lagos as they head north via Ibadan and Ilorin,or to the ancient city of Benin, and the merchant cities beyond the River Niger to the east. At the foot of Lagos,a western corridor of development spawned by the Badagry Expressway takes traffic to the border town of Seme. This horizontal band of city hemmed in by marshlands and creeks is balanced by the Lekki Expressway system east of Victoria Island, which has similarly fulled a corridor of linear developments comprised mainly of large residential estates.The latter road opens up the reclaimed sandbar of the lagoon at Epe to complete a ring road of sorts around the Lagos Lagoon. The former straddles the creek system leading to the old slaving port of Badagry and Porto Novo Benin Republic vividly rendered in The Water House,Antonio Olinto’s novel on nineteenth-and twentieth-century Lagos.

全市高速公路系统由三个连接拉各斯岛与拉各斯内地南北轴向的道路组成，并设置多个融合车道、立交桥交汇处和桥梁以帮助汽车的流动性. 最西端的主干道，知名于开始在拉各斯岛的西端名为EKO大桥西大街系统，这个系统从上穿越jora和Iganmu的沼泽，向北通过Surulere的住宅小区。在校准转折之后，它通过Mushin成为十车道Agege汽车道，最终通向拉各斯北部的老城区阿贝尔库尔. 下一条干线是伊科罗杜路，它作为卡特桥和穆尔塔拉穆罕默德路的延长部分，穿过并远离大路上的老城区，向拉各斯泻湖的北部杰布城镇和伊科罗杜延伸。 最后的干道的是第三大陆桥，它漂浮在拉各斯泻湖上并在西部银行分离.第三大陆桥以十二公里的长度被誉为在非洲最长的桥梁，它使伊科伊地区和维多利亚岛的富裕居民绕过拉各斯大部分地区，向北通过伊巴丹和伊洛林，或古城贝宁，并超越商人城市到尼日尔河东部。在拉各斯的脚下，贝德格瑞高速公路给边境小镇塞米带来了便利的交通，这引起了西部走廊地带的发展。这个由沼泽地和小溪包围的水平城市带是由东维多利亚岛的莱基高速公路系统保持平衡的，同样的，用主要包含了大型住宅屋苑的线性住宅区来填满这个走廊地带. 后者道路开发了埃佩

一整篇关于城市道路规划的英文原文,前三段的翻译。

泻湖的回收沙洲去完成一个能够围绕拉各斯泻湖一周的环形公路。前者跨越小溪系统通向贝德格瑞的老奴隶港水上屋和安东尼奥里托在十九世纪和二十世纪的拉各斯的小说《水屋》中生动描述的波多诺伏贝宁共和国。

Two ring-road systems traverse the east-west and north-south roads;the Apapa Oworonshoki looping westwards from a spur off the Third Mainland Bridge,intersecting Ikorodu Road, Agege Motor Road, Badagry Expressway, terminating at the port complex in Apapa.Here, the ring road seems caught in decades of indecision on the best way to bridge the gap between the Quays at Apapa and the ghosts of the old wharves along Marina Street on Lagos Island. The unbuilt city plans hesitantly pondered this gap, proposing a tunnel in one iteration and bridges at different locations to complete the ring. A German-built inner ring road system encircles the island is a necklace of fast ,elevated, concrete road sections, interrupted by complex interchanges that appear to have been configured to connect strategic destinations when Lagos still held sway as the federal capital.Short bursts of speed are interrupted by swepping intersection,as the road is elevated above the corrugated asbestos roofscape of old colonial offices and the tropical patina on the modernist buildings of the post-coloninal state. The destinations are the old Federal Secretariat,the short spurs leading into Ikoyi Road and the old seat of government,Dodan Barracks, tucked behind Obalende, the commercial district of Lagos Island,and the leafy residential areas of Ikoyi .The latter area,a layout planned on Garden City principles, quietly morphed in description from an exclusive European Reservation Area to a post-indepensence Government Reservation Area. The exclusivity maintained in classic Fanonesgue terms for the new ruling elite or as Fanon puts it “the petit bourgeoisie.”

The inner-ring-road system—built in the 1970s to relieve traffic—obstructs and obliterates the once picturesque promenade of Marina Street,which was reconfigured as the northern edge of a vast car park. This feat was achieved by sand filling the waters on the northern bank of Lagos Harbour adjacent to the old colonial era trading houses and wharves.The reclaimed land acts a support platform for the elevated expressway and slip roads below, which now define the new coastline of Lagos Island before turning north over the Macgregor Canal to complete the fast expressway ring. The city of Lagos pushes up hard against this systerm of expressway,onto which it spills its rapidly growing population and disengages from it when forced to—either by the marshlands yet to be the dual challenge of the topography and mobility needs of Lagos has created a typology of urban spaces :static intersections, appropriated spaces beneath briges and a system of undulating linear expressways; the latter best experienced before the weekly Sunday morning church service traffic.

The expressways of Lagos order this city , providing a movement systerm that has dictated the urban footprint of the city since independence in 1960. The ordering is clear in the instance of the Agege Motor Road/Western Avenue,which in mimicking the colonial railway alignment up to the tongh neighbourhood of Mushin rises to avoid the Ojuelegba junction, skirting the Nation Stadiun to the east, and climaxes at the intersection where the relic of the Nation Theatre nestles,as the expressway

一整篇关于城市道路规划的英文原文,前三段的翻译。

forks in a dizzying spaghetti of complex elevated intersections,ramps,and roundabouts leading to the Apapa Port and Eko Bridge.

The marshlands of Ijora and Iganmu are avoided by the road system, despite holding the centre of national culture, building itself is a curious mimesis of the Palace of Culture and sports in Varna, Bulgaria, which somehow in its appropriated guise served to reinforce the projection of Nigerian nationalist aspirations. Concrete spokes radiating out skyward and suggestively converging the energies of the black world into its womb as the centerpiece of the 1977 Second Festival of Black Arts and Culture commonly referred an ambiguous space that combined high culture, industrial detritus and marshlands enclosed somewhat by the slender columns of the elevated expressways. The two-speed city shaped by concrete is present at its most extreme here. The German-engineered bridge piers and road deck shade an assortment of commercial activity in a somewhat unorthodox landscape of appropriation, which is as much a metaphor for the polarized economic realities as the juxtaposition of the rulers’ will against that of the ruled, rural space, tradition versus modernity. These binaries unwittingly burden Lagos with a complexity often read superficially as simply chaotic, rather than a work in progress where the aspired modernity of post-colonial Nigeria is being resolved and reworked.

The iconography of the concrete expressway underscores Nigeria’s modern aspirations forged by the post-colonial state. The expressway network was placed at the core of a nationalist modernization project that sought to incorporate and subsume space at the scale of the city, nation, and the continent, all requiring “integration” into the sphere of Nigerian Federal military power. The quasi-militaristic undertones of fast armoured mobility that the expressway recalls-tested for instance during the brutal quelling of the 1990 coup that saw armour pouring out of the Ikeja Cantonment on the mainland and racing down Ikorodu Road towards Lagos Island to relieve a besieged Dodan Barracks. The ownership by the military of the two key five-year development plans from which these roads were built makes it difficult to regard the Third Mainland Bridge simply as a bypass road, and it is tempting to speculate more cynically perhaps from beneath the shadow of the military junta planning for the avoidance of military ambush. The road engineers detached this elevated expressway completely from the city thereby establishing a corridor for a high-speed sprint(traffic permitting)from the leafy suburb of lkoyi to the safety of the airport in Ikeja in the event of the inevitable mutiny of junior officers.

The static intersections of the city run contrary to their intended purposes, That of permitting free traffic flow”; instead, the congealed mass of vehicles provide the footfall for trade and commercial activity and reconfigure the sense of the city with the emergence of new destinations yelled out by the conductors from the ubiquitous Danfo and Molue buses:” Oshodi, Oshodi!!!” “…Ojuelegba. Ojuelegba…!!!” the modernist aspirations evoked in the narrative of the Otto Koenigsberger led government planning team have been tested and reinterpreted; the pristine modernist imagery of orderly workers and vehicles rendering the space of this newly independent nation rudely disrupted by its people.His words echo from the text of the 1964 study:”This road is a super expressway,and should be flanked on both sides

一整篇关于城市道路规划的英文原文,前三段的翻译。

by parallel access or service roads,bicycle tracks,and pedestrian walks.Where crossing is necessary,the motorway can be elevated or on the mainland where elevation permits it,depressed below the street level with service roads crossing over it.Where it is on the same level as access roads,it should be fenced off;for a motorway is designed for a speed of 50 to 60 mph or even higher.”They are largely ignored by the citizens of Lagos,who view the congealed traffic on the surface of the road system as fertile ground for the trading activities that have proliferated across the city.

The concrete expressways of Lagos heralded the arrival of the post-colonial Nigerian state.This transition is apparent in the texture of urban literature on Lagos from the 1960s and 1980s.Cyprian Ekwensi’s classic novel,Jagua Nana,evokes a quaint colonial town with the sounds of trains being shunted in the now derelict yards of Ebutte Metta,truncheon-wielding police constables,and shopping days to Kingsway on the Marina,set against the hard grit of concrete post-oil-boom Lagos sketched by Ben Okri of Molue buses falling off bridges into the lagoon;or the slum settlement of Bridge City under a bridge from Chris Abani’s Graceland,set in Lagos during the early 1980s.

The concrete of Lagos defines its aspirations but ultimately works as the substrate for the city population to appropriate and redefine notions of modernity as crafted by the ruling elite of the early post-colonial state.The city is being rediscovered and revealed,however,as the Lagos state administration reasserts its claim to the public realm through interventions of landscape beautification for”slack spaces”around the static nodes of the expressway system.As the Nigerian state seeks to restate its claim to relevance for its citizenry,led by the current administration of Babatunde Fashola,the city has become the laboratory for a series of public-private partnership initiatives established in the last decade to deliver urban services such as transport,utilities,and waste management.Thus,the city is emerging as the site where the citizen is being re-engaged,as municipal authorities seek to regain their trust and perhaps instil wider aspirations to make Lagos the most dynamic megacity in sub-Saharan Africa.

Endnotes

1 Chris Abani,Graceland(New York:Picador,2004).

2 The Lagos State Govermment disputed the Federal Government 2007 census population figures of just over nine million,preferring to use their own estimates of seventeen million for planning purposes.

3 The post-civil-war military government increased control of highways under direct federal control from just over 5,000 kilometres to close to 25,000 kilometres in the mid-1970s,and set out planning and building a network to better integrate the country.This action was a direct consequence of the fragmenting of the administrative units from four semi-autonomous regions in 1966 to twelve states in 1967.The purpose of state creation was to prevent any one single unit from dominating the centre.See Allison Ayida,The Nigerian Revolution,and F.Okunnu,In Service of the Nation.

4 Omoigui n.d.

5 Otto Koenigsberger,Charles Abrams,Susumu Kobe,Maurice Shapiro,and Michael